wherestridestheworld-girdling - Tumblr blog

[wherestridestheworld-girdling]

The Composite Black ch.1

He crackles with such abominable laughter. Emblazoned on his mulish mask of tapered sinew, hate-hewn flesh folds caked with dust and brusque are wide swathes of topological erosion.  This is the dermatological attrition of ghouls and goblins, creatures of depravity and denizens of sacrilege, monsters whose skin weathers and bleaches in the divine of the daylight.  His garish façade is the embossment from a nightmare, a face that haunted the sculptor’s sleep, ensnared eternal in gothic stone gargoyles or the twisted grimace of an amputated stub adorning a tortured ashen oak.  His wrinkles purse like snake pleats, shivering subtly, coiled around his contemptuous orifices, intermittently blustered about by the intake of his olfactory snot-pits and wreathed around a rancid gyre of dental shards. Pan up but avoid the swallowing riptide of his gawk, those arrested by the shifting guise of his lunatic looking-glass eyes are often burnt asunder in smears of soot.  They are eyes of caged aggression, of molten wrath, volcano eyes that sear what they see.  The color of spent fuel, of cadaverous cinders, broken glass and smoke damage. Encircling this myopia is the crown-of-thorns of his brow, framing his persona like a band of spear-spiked dagger-tooth crags.  These are accelerated geologic processes, flexing tectonic plates which know not the placation of a tranquil lull; their beveled furrows exist in a duality of disgust and mockery.  Cast-iron rims lipping twin cauldrons, forever bubbling.  

This is a hardened, deadened man whose scars shroud his marred body and mind.  Each patch of discolored tissue that tattoos him tells tales, mostly violent and cruel. But the companion text is tenfold the volume, bedecking disfigured corpses strung about his travels.  Most he left horizontal but some he let vertical, a fate hardly better.  Those who walk the world mangled by the bite of his blade speak a bit softer, keep an eye at their backs, wake sweaty in the night.  He is the shade which haunts their periphery, cloaking uncertainty in fear and calling out to them from the shadows.  Just a winking remembrance causes the heart to race, the pupils to dilate, and the past superimposes the present.  A torture wheel of cyclical trauma, perpetual terror of a deathblow half inflicted.  His victims are many; they line cemeteries and bar stools, numb and cold to the touch. Almost as if he burned their spirits on the flaming alter of his own vehemence then let them frost over, a sacrifice to savagery, a vulgar display of power.      

No matter.  “Let the dead rot and the livin’ scorn,” blistering words from his blistered lips, shaky and sun-sick in the dry heat of the early morn.

“I dare say yer yella hide won’t last til’ noon. Those buzzards circlin’ up there won’t waste a horse’s fart before they’re on ya like the flies, pickin your eyes out, digging through your gizzard.  I bet even half past 11 you’ll look even more like a dimes worth of dog meat than your ugly mug does now.  Matter of fact maybe when your boots stop kickin I oughta cut you down from that tree and drag your sorry carcass through the mud into town so that the strays can each get a good meal from ya. It’ll be the only good thing you ever did for this town.”

Even as he said this, serrating his speech with disdain, the creases of the undertaker’s neck shook with fright.  He felt as he had as a little boy throwing rocks at tethered dogs, hoping that in their fury the stake anchoring them wouldn’t be snatched from the dirt.  The evil within this man seemed unnatural, impossible.  It was foreign to him, this relentless rage, foreign to this tiny town pitted on the outskirts of dusty emptiness.  This tiny town, where Main Street is the only street and whose primary riffraff are a few rough tough cattle rustlers, vagrant out-of-towners drawing from the herd come the fat flock of Spring time.  Enter this black frothing demon whose snide grin makes the white dressed church ladies sign the cross, a smirk which consumeth like hellfire, and paradise becomes pit.  Anubis had seen his share of atrocities, sights which may have maddened one of fragile temperament. He’d been a field medic in the Spanish war.  Seen, heard and sometimes felt the splatter of men being shredded into mincemeat, splayed inside out by scalding shards of metal. He’d repressed much of those wretched memories, loosing them on his past future, which even now harass every moment of absent rest.  And the days were not long passed when he’d been called on as the chief embalmer to clean up after a few of the Union’s scorched earth campaigns, burying massacred Hopi women and children, of all the vile things, in yellow-earthen mass graves usually after weeks of decay and carrion pick-throughs.  He’d even had to put down his only daughter when her body swelled up with gangrene, but the carnage left by this awful man, this brimstone beast, was the brutality of legend.  This was the monster before him, the twisted serpent of the apocalypse, Apep, fettered in maat by Osiris’ noose.

Then the shark put away his sawtooth bouquet, pivoting his rope burned neck in the guillotine of the hangman’s hoop, directing his vociferous focus on another individual from the small crowd of the witnesses who’d climbed the hill to watch this dreadful man’s death.  The old Indian woman Xmucane met his fiery craters with her own cataracted pupils, a challenge in defiance, adversaries horn-locked on the battlefield of all space and time.  Their concentrated beams of perception met and clashed, smoldering with static energy.  

The words rose out of him and blew toward their mark like a waft of chemical death, “Have you come to tell my fortune grandmother? I should hope that even a blind ol’ witch like you could see the signs of my fate today.  Or maybe you’re just so disoriented and confused you just wandered up here on this hill like the geriatric ol’ hag you are.  Too..” his lips began to leak a rotten-colored mucus foam as they flapped and pursed and sneered.  Spurts punctuated his rabid barks as the muscles in his whole body contracted in spasms of steaming rage.  His carapace turned a furious shade of boiled red. “young to die and too old to screw! I’ve seen moldy cow pies that…” a gruff fit of gravelly coughing seized the doomed man so that any further curses became just choking hoarse gasps.  Minutes passed and the hacking only worsened until only a few caustic spasms and the muted gurgling of air being forced through thick fluid remained.  Suddenly within the leather of the man, the smoke-blackened corridors of his body flooded with sludge, his air passages became expulsion channels for emergency discharge.  Prison-food regurgitation geysered up the tunnel of his throat and waterfalled out of the cave mouth.  The gastrointestinal flow sizzled down his jailbird stripes in chunks of grey dribble as eyes, nose and gob spurted like drainage faucets.  At last, when the conniption ceased, the muscles holding him ridged loosed limp, letting his weight dangle from the rope collaring him for a moment. Coated in perspiration and exhaustion, all that was left of him was the furnace of his anger and a heaving breath.  Air pressure writhed against the pressure of the lariat strangling his airway, lungs bursting in heft.  

Xmucane was already halfway down the hill, strutting slowly and steadily, never looking back, never uttering a word; she just continued driving her cane into the dry earth followed up by each hoary shuffle step. This repeated in rhythmic synchronicity as her short precise movements churned the declining distance back to town, through glades and gullies, past rockslides and embankments, hugging the curvature of the trail and moving like the passing minutes.  Somewhere, there amongst the bramble, a whisking river resided as an auditory undercurrent, a rivulet which had conveyed sediment from distant mountains for hundreds of thousands of years.  This is the sculptor who carved Hangman’s Hill from bare plane. It reached out from within the drape of the trees at a spot perpendicular with the crook in the trail of the advancing ancient seer, Xmucane, greeting her with roaring thunder from the mountains.  She continued on past the Road to Xibalba, with her descended her daughter-in-law the waning moon, fading into the light of day.  

“In nomine Iesu Christi, Deus et Dominus noster, Immaculatae Virginis intercessione ab ipsis Maria..”

In the Name of Jesus Christ, our God and Lord, strengthened by the intercession of the immaculate Virgin Mary..

Back atop Hangman’s Hill, at the seat of the execution of this nameless man, the preceding spectacle of grotesque behaviors attracted like moth to flame the mercy of god’s instrument on earth, the surrogate of Papal presence, the local orthodoxical authority of godliness, the Catholic missionary Ruggieri degli Ubaldini.  With the bluff as his sandy pulpit he exercised training he’d received in the seminary as a youth.  Vocal muscle memory and gospel rigmarole drilled ad nauseam under the oratorical tutelage of the Head Father at the rocky coastline church of San Miguel.  He fondly recalled praying to the Blessed Virgin those many years ago on bent knee, tightly gripping the Bible and rosary his parents had given to him, trembling with righteousness in that stuffy old adobe chapel as chartreuse swells of spray crashed against the rocks. There were times of distant recollection when the word of god resound within his mind like vivid hanging melodic lines of Gregorian monks bounding out of mass halls and cathedrals.  But with the melting years his faith had become by jaded by dour funeral processions and exorbitant church politics.  He clutched his indented Holy Book in one crinkled hand and the other pressed palm forward, shaking with a bit of the hall-hallowed vindication he’d once felt but mostly just the fear of an excruciating death at the hands of this tenuously bound hellion.  He prayed as if blacksmithing a suit of armor.  

“Mother of God, beato Michaeli Archangelo, beatis apostolis tuis Petro et Paulo, et omnibus sanctis auctoritate officii nostri potentem..”

Mother of God, of blessed Michael the archangel, of the blessed apostles Peter and Paul and all the saints and powerful in the holy authority of our ministry..

“suscipere fidenter impetus propulsare insidias diabolic..”

we confidently undertake to repulse the attacks and deceits of the devil..

A light breeze swept the hillcrest. Misty dew-laden air whisped up in thermal currents as the freshly angled sun warmed the valleys of wildflowers and sod below, cycling moisture.  The breeze ruffled multicolored swatches of deciduous leaves stapled onto the fronds and twigs of the circular band of white oaks which surrounded the site of the hanging.  Then the breeze tousled the silent crowd, flexing hat brims, swaying ties, brushing skirt tails, flapping pant-legs, bringing dusty tears to dry eyes behind the veil of handkerchiefs.  Finally the wind rippled into the ganglion of the scene stirring its focal subject.   The man’s limp unconscious body swiveled slightly in the stirrup of the noose strung from the single low-hanging splintered branch of the lone dead tree.  However most of his inanimate weight remained planted to the earth, supported by locked knees atop an aged fruit box, its paint flecking.  A crystalline snail of spittle oozed from the gape of his mouth and was blown and whipped around by the current around the side of his head, seeping into one of the few remaining haggard tufts of bristle on the back of his desiccated scalp.  

“Deus oritur; inimici ejus dispersus est et qui oderunt eum, a facie ejus, secundum impellere fumum..”

God arises; His enemies are scattered and those who hate Him flee before Him. As smoke is driven away..

“ita pulsi sunt; sicut exustio ignis tabescerent, sic animam meam in conspectu Domini. Ecce crucem Dómini..”

So are they driven; as wax melts before the fire, so the wicked perish at the presence of God. Behold the Cross of the Lord..

“fugite inimicorum. Leo de tribu Iuda, radix David, qui vicit. Fiat misericordia tua, Domine, super nos quanta speravimus in te..”

Flee bands of enemies. The Lion of the tribe of Juda, the offspring of David, hath conquered. May thy mercy, Lord, descend upon us as great as our hope in thee..

The diminutive old man paused after that line for a dangling moment, taking a rasped breath and wiping the sweat dripping down his forehead with a cross-embroidered handkerchief produced from within the folds of his black vestments.  A few syllables still hung in the air, echoes of Medieval Latin ricocheting off canyon cathedrals, saguaro shrines, stain glass mirage.  But the point of omni-ocular convergence remained the captive.  The small crowd of tense observers were fixated, captivated by the captive, as if the depth of their focus was his only restraints.  It had to be unequivocal, this man’s extinction; if even an iota of irresolute distress remained it would be catastrophic to these quiet people and their small agrestic community.  It had to be confirmed, the light leaving his eyes, so they could live once again in their accustomed peace.  Ruggieri continued..

“Adjutorium nostrum in nobis, quicumque haec legis, Et spiritus immundi, omnis satanica viribus, omnes invadentes infernali, omnia impium legiones, et coetus sectis..”

We drive you from us, whoever you may be, unclean spirits, all satanic powers, all infernal invaders, all wicked legions, assemblies and sects..

“In nomine Domini nostri Jesu Christi et eius virtute, ut sit Deus et effugare ab ecclesia et ab animabus ad imaginem et similitudinem Dei, divini agni sanguine redemisti. Serpens callidissime..”

In the Name and by the power of our lord Jesus Christ, may you be snatched away and driven from the church of God and from the souls made to the image and likeness of God and redeemed by the precious blood of the divine lamb. Most cunning serpent..

“YEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS?!!  You do well to utter such flattery but this meagre title leaves much to be desired by my parched discrimination.  My sapless ear has reached but a fractional portion of its full satiation and demons these days just don’t grovel as they did in those glorious days of old, the Fall anew, when plague shadows of locusts and immortal armies of darkness smote the world under my blood blackened banner. Abbadon? Lucifer? Perhaps Wicked One? Or Deciever? Appolyon is what the Greeks called me or maybe you’re feeling particularly biblical, in that case the classic Hebrew is utter elation.  Bleed your tribute and yield your dignity, lay paltry and prostrate before the infamous Beelzbub.  Nothing says ‘Prince of Darkness’ like a black winged monster that manipulates buzzing clouds of ravenous flying insects.  Although my personal favorite is good ol’ Satan, doesn’t the word just remind you of pagan blood orgies and violent fertility sacrifices cast under occult torchlight? Ssssaaataann.  It rolls off the tongue, or hisses off if yours is forked I suppose.  Let’s all say it together! Saaataan… Saaaaatan…”

“Decipere humanum genus ultra audeas, Dei Ecclesiam persequi, ac Dei electos excutere et cribrare sicut triticum..”

You shall no more dare to deceive the human race, persecute the Church, torment God's elect and sift them as wheat..

“Imperat tibi Deus altissimus, he, cui in magna tua superbia te similem haberi adhuc præsumis. Imperat tibi Deus Pater..”

The most high God commands you, He with whom, in your great insolence, you still claim to be equal. God the father commands you..

“Imperat tibi Deus Filius. Imperat tibi Deus Spiritus Sanctus.  Christus Dei Verbum caro factum, imperat”

God the son commands you. God the holy ghost commands you. Christ, God's word made flesh, commands you..

“Your feeble crusader dogma and moral avarice is fetid muck pilled high by sociopathic old men, deceptively arranged to countervail their own perverted chastity and empathetic ineptitude.  The theologic doctrines to which you egregiously prescribe, and to which you presume supremacy are just the bones and bits, carrion detritus, convenient canon leftovers that you have culturally appropriated and reconfigured from semi-legitimate religious heritages into a hypocritical, racist and sexist, anthropocentric cult of personality and fanaticism.  The tyranny, genocide and mass subjugation performed by the filthy, bloodstained tentacles of your Holy Catholic Apostolic Church and all its puppet entities and dummy financial institutions is as heinous an act of malign villainy as has ever been committed, and it occurs in the light of day, applauded by boisterous mobs of enraptured subjects. It’s commendable, it really is.  Such blood-draining callousness, such wanton barbarism, such murked wickedness.  We are brothers you and I, legionnaires of death. Don’t you remember? We cut ourselves out from the same womb.  Don’t waste your breathe Padre, let us entwine our barbed fingers, for together we can concoct such exquisite chaos and mouthwatering malcontent.”      

“Qui pro salute generis nostri tua invidia perditi, humiliavit semetipsum factus oboediens usque ad mortem..”

He who to save our race outdone through your envy, humbled Himself, becoming obedient even unto death..

“Qui Ecclesiam suam ædificavit supra firmam petram, et portas inferi non praevalebunt adversus eam, cum ea ipse permansurus omnibus diebus usque ad consummationem saeculi..”

He who has built His church on the firm rock and declared that the gates of hell shall not prevail against Her, because He will dwell with Her all days even to the end of the world..

“Ergo, draco maledicte et omnis legio diabolica, adjuramus te per Deum vivum, per Deum verum, per Deum sanctum..”

Thus, cursed dragon, and you, diabolical legions, we adjure you by the living God, by the true God, by the holy God..

“Per Deum, qui sic dilexit mundum, ut Filium suum unigenitum daret, ut omnes qui credit in eum, non pereat, sed habeat vitam aeternam..”

By the God who so loved the world that he gave up his only son, that every soul believing in him might not perish but have life everlasting..

“Cessa decipere humanas creaturas, eisque æternæ perditionìs venenum eis; desine Ecclesiæ nocere, et ejus libertati..”

Stop deceiving human creatures and pouring out to them the poison of eternal damnation; stop harming the church and hindering her liberty..

“Vade, satana, inventor et magister omnis fallaciae, hostis humanae salutis..”

Be gone, Satan, inventor and master of all deceit, enemy of man's salvation..

Explosively vaulted across the physical and virtuous distance between these two men was a putrid projectile, an expulsion of contempt, a gust its coconspirator.  The coagulated salivary squirt was a conglomerate of gastric ebullition, nostril slop, fermented dental scum and various caramel colored pusses and oozes from infected teeth, gums and cold sores.  The noxious cocktail erupted in a sticky spray that coated the clandestine breeze, commodiously transporting the range strike to its unsuspecting target. A toxic cloud of insolence and filth assaulted the castigating old man, penetrating his saintly demeanor.  It splattered in tobacco tinged splashes across his gold rimmed spectacles, a bit of the acrid pitch inflamed the sensitive peripheral creases of his naked eyes.  While most of the foul fluid doused his sun-spotted forehead and drooping cheeks, lathering them in slime, a portion cemented to his short lampshade mustache while another equitable fraction spewed into his articulating mouth via direct oral transmission.  Vomiting ensued and part of the crowd rushed over to aid the collapsing Ruggieri until he waved them off, wildly swaying up from his knees with his bible clenched under his arm.  The brown old skeleton doggedly rose to his feet and continued the exorcism, shaking in his robes, sweat pouring down the troughs in his face.  The nameless man just laughed and laughed, a rapping sound like a fissure tearing open the ground or a mammoth wave slapping a stone shore or a shimmering bolt of lightning shredding the clouds, low pitched and decrepitating.    

“Da locum Christo, in quo nihil invenisti de operibus tuis; da locum unam, sanctam, catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam, quam Christus acquisivit Sanguine suo pretio..”

Give place to Christ in whom you have found none of your works; give place to the one, holy, Catholic and apostolic church acquired by Christ at the price of His blood..

“Humiliare sub potenti manu Dei; contremisce et effuge, invocato a nobis sancto et terribili nomine Jesu, quem inferi tremunt..”

Stoop beneath the all-powerful hand of God; tremble and flee when we invoke the holy and terrible name of Jesus, this name which causes hell to tremble..

“Cui Virtutes nomen istud et Potestates et Dominationes subjectæ sunt caeli, hoc indesinenter quem Cherubim et Seraphim..”

This name to which the virtues, powers and dominations of heaven are humbly submissive, this name which the cherubim and seraphim praise unceasingly..

“Dicentes: Sanctus Sanctus, Sanctus..”

Repeating: holy, holy, holy..

“HAAAHAHA HEHE AHHHHAAAAAAAAHAHA HEHE!.....”

“Better save your prayers for decent folk, Padre. This one here is just a few heel clicks away from feeding the worms at the bottom of an unmarked grave.  I don’t reckon we’ll hear his sorry squawks when he’s buried six feet under being dragged to hell by goblins and ghouls. Why don’t you give it a rest son? What would your momma say, seein’ you up there spittin’ an’ laughing like a mad-man, carrying on so shamefully, right before you meet your maker?”

“Oh I don’t know if my mother would have much to say in the matter.  She sort of lost her voice when I was born, as well as a heap of internal organs. What can I say; I was a very needy, grabby infant.  But I’m sure it made for an eventful day for the country doctor at the county courthouse, a birth certificate and a death certificate all in one wagon ride!”

“That’s enough young man.  No sense in speakin’ ill of the dearly departed now that my gavel’s swung and your noose fitted.  The big judge sittin’ up there in the sky probably has enough scorned testimony marked against your spoiled soul as it is.”

What perfunctory sympathy he usually felt for those he’d sentenced to capital annihilation had completely eroded within the judge at this point, soured in his gut like green meat.  This man was nothing to him, horse-shit stuck to the heel of his boot, malted hogwash foaming in the sun.  Yet how could ultimate justice still feel so inequitable? Tragic pawns, passive hosts of death reproducing itself.  Putting down vile men for vile acts leaves their stench on you, their skin under your fingernails, their curses echoing your ears.  After being the eminent lawman, judge and jury with a chrome peacekeeper for nearly twenty years in this township, ghosts with bullet holes in their heads followed Yama around.  If he looked over his shoulder he knew he’d see them standing there, garbed in caked blood and charnel dirt, forgotten children grown up.  “Another for the spooks,” he’d tell the barkeep each night.  With whiskey on his breath he’d sing to the sunrise, silky phantoms surrounding him. “There's blood on the saddle and blood on the ground, and a great great big puddle of blood all around; a cowboy lay in it, all covered with gore, and he never will ride any broncos no more..”

The sun beat down, acquiescing its focal zenith, heightening the midday heat.  Its rays dissolved the gruesome gaggle’s shadows like the razing eye of god, whitewashing the hillcrest in solar bleach.  High noon aproacheth, the awful hour of death.  A brazen beam struck Yama’s copper badge, ricocheting off into the prisoner’s soggy iris, branding it like a blacksmith’s white-hot nail. The scorch only magnified as the lawman took limped steps towards the disheveled captive, his spurs and leather speaking softly.  Nameless and noosed, the damned man recoiled at the brilliant bright, squirming in his chains, insulating himself under clinched eyelids.  

“The time is nigh, boy.”

From behind the wiry judge approached the town doctor, a shriveled cob pipe pinned under his icicle white mustache and a hand restraining his charcoal bowler against the pull of the wind.  His slacks brushed through the ankle-high wildgrass until the accused hinged faintly within arm’s length. Dhanvantari, the wizened backcountry surgeon, reached up as he had at countless executions to examine the machine of death.  In a far off lifetime, or only what seemed to have been, Dhanvantari was a merchant ship’s doctor, operating on deck with rusty instruments in turbulent seas, pulling the captain’s teeth by crinkling wicks of sperm oil lanterns, sweeping puddles of blood into the sea.  Those decades spent marinering the open ocean made his fingers as fluent with knots and lashings as he was with the braids of the spine or with tensile ligament musculature. This man had lost many lifetimes to the sea, swallowed by brine, swept overboard by swells, but somehow it always spat him back out, after due restitution.  How many times had he thought he’d seen the sun for the last time as the waves closed around him and the surface fell away?  Six? Seven?  Perhaps he was still there now, drifting to the salty bottom and this, an illusion in the last rays of light, an eternity in an escaping air bubble.  Regardless he thumbed the noose knot, testing its competence, ignorant of the murdering intimidation ensnared within it.  He examined the loop, stretching it across the man’s Adam’s apple in strangulation simulation.  By his determination death should be nearly instantaneous with the fracturing of the epistropheus.  Dhanvantari removed his hands.

“Whaddaya say Doc? Humane?”

“Too humane.”

“Oh I wish that was up to me, hell I’d have him drawn and quartered already, each arm and leg’d be draggin’ through the desert in opposite directions by streakin’ stallions by now.  But I suppose a bullet in the temple would get the job done too. No time to waste with slaphappy daydreams, we’ve got to adhere to the distinguished code established by our competent elect, those Washington monkeys and their executive goon.  Is it whats-his-name Rutherford or wha-cha-ya ma-call-it Garfield after the last one of their confounded dog-and-pony-show elections? God only knows.. How’s about we get on with it?  Next the accused is to be read their offenses but I’m sure all of us gathered here and now can well attest to the horrendous acts of brutality this man has committed.  No sense in speakin’ of such evil since his deplorable deeds will undoubtedly torment our waking hours forever.  But I won’t deny the prisoner his last words.  Even an infernal devil can sequester some semblance of penitence from the Lord in his last hour if his voice holds even an ounce of goodness. What say you, rogue? Bless thy tongue and utter thy last words.”  

“I have nothing to say to you people or your forlorn humanity.  I was birthed among you but sever our kinship thereafter.  Your bastard race of mutant hominids is the scourge of existence. You ungraciously tout your dubiously predominant intellect with one arm raised in self-admiration while the other quashes down your stricken brother, stepping on his pleading face and bruised throat.  You feed each other into the teeth of the meat grinder for a few pieces of silver, sealing the audacity with a smile and a kiss.  You’ve the blood of your father Ares and the fury of your mother Lyssa. Such horrific worm-like abominations of filth, I want no part of you unless you’re disinfected, dismembered, dissected and freeze-dried.  But you have taught me much, much barbarity.  Because of your imprint I am what I am, the distilled essence of your misanthropy, hate tincture.  I am the anti-soul, the maneater, the devourer of fire and light, the siren of the necropolis, the falling reaper, Death’s dragoon.  I am the one to whom the wolves howl and in my company volts of vultures and cackles of hyenas.  Draped in my cape of babies’ bones and crown of thorns I have blistered the nightmares of the fearful since the dawn of man.   In my wake spite suicides and human husks, desolation and brimstone. You cannot kill me, I am already dead.”

His taunt a command, Yama reduced him to mindless thrashing with a decisive toe-kick to the fruit box, sending it tumbling off before stepping back and affirming his capital judgement.  Gasps ran through the crowd as the knot was tested for capacity for the first time, the charred branch held strong under the burden of the man’s now disintegrating ego.  He expended his life force in feral flounders of wild muscle contractions, as if parasitic monsters within him wrestled to escape from their host’s diminishing body, spinning himself around haphazardly like a broken whirligig despite his wrist and ankle restraints.  Clearly his movements were involuntary, spastic seizures of shocked nerve endings triggered by raging lightning storms of neuronal firing as distressed organ systems desperately faced shut down and annihilation.  His already unsightly appearance became even more revolting in the absence of mental dispensation.  Cloudy eyes pinched in their sockets, bulging outward in masses of crimson jelly as the blood vessels ruptured around flaked lids. Indeterminate sloughs of foamy fluids composed of various pasty consistencies, textures and hues leaked from his orifices, drooling off the dripping points on his face like subterranean stalactites.  A scarred sliver of grey tongue draped from within his chapped lips.  Eventually the jittery agitation ceased and the stillness was broken only by the swivels of his vacant body.  His grizzled neck was crumpled in the noose, disjointed disks of irregular vertebrae pressed asymmetrically against the inner walls of his skin in nauseating bulges of obvious malformation.  

In the crowd a woman began to wail, her immediate elicit reaction to the majority of external stimuli after such loss as befitting a victim who had been made widow by the now deceased bane.  She pulled her black bonnet down over her eyes and reached for her threadbare handkerchief.  Now what? A question she posed to herself, the fates, townsfolk, anyone who’d listen to her bereaved sobs.  Her maternity scars and her wedding ring were the only remaining evidence of her curriculum vitae, her frontier family and their homestead ambition; stolen like the breath from her lungs.  Somewhere along the wagon trail, abandoned in the gutter like a roadside attraction were the charred remains of her Manifest Destiny, a monument of torched wagon frame and scattered skulls. The thought of which drove her to nihilism. But revenge was an opportune emotional departure from the tragedy her faculties refuted as preposterous, incorrigible, a night terror to be expunged by the waking mind and the ascending sun. But confound it!  There it was! That dastardly conflagration, a gleaming confirmation of calamity, the boiling skies its diabolic domain and drenched in its glow she simmered in survivor’s grief.  Niobe willed the hellmouth open, to stride between its chasmal jaws.  Her ample offerings of woe lured the rabid devils and unclean spirits from their untold ethereal realms but on upon arrival she was already of stone.  A brooding destitute, an aimless golem of flesh and bone and tears.

From within the congregation Anubis stepped forth to dress and prepare the body for burial, a process which his coarse muscles and tired joints knew well.  They were creased by the contour of the embalming tools, sculpted by a mortician’s toil; grave dirt under his cuticles from the raw tomb shoveled out this morning.  He unsheathed a blade from his belt, feet advancing, to cut down the inert cadaver from its moored swing.  Behind him his comrades held the reins of a bridled burro which had ferried the bound prisoner to this hill in life and would now from it in death.  It shifted listlessly in its halter, braying nervously with whipping tail.  He approached the hanged man serenely, detached, his mind distanced by the habitual funerary ritual he’d undergone so frequently this past fortnight with so many hideously slaughtered.  But at rest his morbid vocation invaded the asylum of his slumber.  Within the dreamscape he donned the suit of a jackal breathlessly devouring grisly messes strewn about by Death himself, scavenging meat morsels from innocents slain.  But it was over now, the beast was vanquished and this would be his final burial.  He extended his arms, blade in hand, to cleave the noose when the whiskers on his scruff spiked straight up.    

The dead man frenzied into rampage by the scent of slaughter, riving the lull, summoned to survive by his colleague in chaos the razor blade.  The tumultuous details of the next few moments can scarcely be spoken of, saturated with skirmish vectors and martial artistry but if one simply follows the slashes of the edge, its perforatory operation can be fluently plotted.  In one swift motion his blueish corpse-hand swaddled the knife’s pommel, enveloping Anubis’.  It then yanked upwards, burying the tip just underneath the undertaker’s chin, tickling his brain like a lobotomist.  The next instantaneous flash of dynamism was the stiletto’s evacuation from his greymatter.  It whistled as it arced through the air, tearing into the fiend’s own death-paled shatter-boned neck, sinking in and carving in a radial orbit around its circumference.  In a splitting second the ruined mort had accomplished a series of obscene acts totally unforeseen, completely against the natural laws while still bound in chains, and as such, the throng was baffled immobile.  Aghast with gaped mouth and opaque eyes before such ruthlessness, the man holding the burro’s reins barely noticed as it bolted off. Yama’s hand lunged for his holstered pistol as Anubis finally dropped to his knees.

As the last degree of girth was rent, gravity bisected the possessed’s brainstem, sending his feet to tread the earth and his dislodged cranium to roll it, unencumbering the blood-sprayed noose loop.  At this point fright overtook the cluster and fugue became imperative.  They trampled each other to flee this undead waif, careening down the hillside, never mind the trail with evil nipping at the heels. But one gallant soul delayed, familiar with the company of demons.  Yama leveled his revolver at the headless monster loosing three rounds before it was upon him, lopping off his gun hand, hacking through his throat and spilling open his intestines in one mercurial, clockwise arm rotation of serpentine laceration.  Like a tornado it bucked off Yama’s dead shoulders after trailing fingers relieved the weapon from his amputated grip, tumbling acrobatically through the gap between its next kill.  

Scrambling to escape was Ruggieri degli Ubaldini, sprawling over his tailored robes, clawing the muck for leverage with gold ringed fingers. A cone of destructive force interrupted the priest’s bumbling with a tremendous boom of sound shattering.  The slug pierced his temporal lobe just behind the ear, exploding from the other side in a plume of gore and smoke.  Padre crumpled in the dust but his soul soared skybound on angel wings while cherubim and seraphim beckoned him from their hammocks, the clouds.  Another righteous crusader of light skewered on the flames of evil and so sealed was his heavenly reward, obedient even in martyrdom to the cult he worshipped.   The gates of St. Peter were thrown open upon on his winged approach, the celestial scene frescoed immortal by Nuvolone’s Milanese masterpiece.  But the earth claimed his body, to the victor the spoils.

Twin claps of corkscrewing thunder plowed two more inconsequentials, their flaccid constitution summersaulted down an embankment in snaps of branches, dousing the underbrush with their blood.  The doctor, Dhanvantari afforded a precarious over-the-shoulder peak at the proximate commotion between labored footfalls, just long enough to see Death’s skeleton-hand reach for his face.  And then he was dragged to the frothy underbelly, towed from the shallows to breathless leagues of darkness, to the frigid depths, the domain of the leviathan and its swimming monsters.  His cob pipe floated up to the surface like an epitaph.  

Last alive was the half-hearted Niobe, tailed by her shadow of mourning.  She fled on instinct alone, lusting for a peaceful deathbed to lay her head.  She mused macabre that she’d be visited by twinkling visions of her loved ones, at last reunited in paradise after they carried her from her sepulchral bedstead, off and away into the white light. Her wits were unraveled by the poison of this unfulfilled conclusion, drunk with adrenaline at concept of such unimaginable pain of an undoubtedly savage mutilation.  The tree line broke and a valley of Spring-bloomed wildflowers carpeted her clambering passage with purple street signs of knapweed and rushpink, golden sidewalks of butterfly weed and bahia, creamy bushels of loveroot and turkeypea. She sprinted through their syrupy bells with hiked dress and tapping laced leather boots, soon slathered with aromatic pollen.  Their perfume seeped into her psyche, fumed by her exhausted inhalations, tousling her antediluvian reptilian cortex, the cerebral seat of fear and flight.  The flowers drenched her in a calm, resonant bliss which relaxed her gait.  Suddenly she stopped.  Her shadow had dissipated and she found herself on the embanked edge of the lily field, below a river’s bellowing whitewater scrapped against huge agate boulders.  A slight draft swept through the valley, undulating the buttercups and the tassels of her braided hair.  Where had she lost her bonnet?  She peered down and found it tangled in spines of sagebrush but her reach was interrupted by a blindsiding death.  The monstrosity shoulder tackled her while her weight was unbalanced, tossing them both off the ledge of the cliff.  It stabbed her repeatedly while falling, madly puncturing her face down to her abdomen with glossy lesions.

The white dashing crests of alpine water slapped the hurtling pair, bowing under their load and momentum.  The sacred stream drew them into its clutches, buffeting their languid corpses with jagged rapids succeeding in the thorough pulverization of their now unrecognizable meat mishmash.  Hunks of homogenous human peripherals floated downstream like the foodstuffs conveyer belt in a packing plant.  A few flesh pocked bones flipped and twisted, arrested by the current as its skeletal companions swept by the festivities, a sanguine parade.  Soon they were utterly mired on an outcropping of some rocks, the fisherman’s net of an eddy.  Passing nearby Anubis’ knife head embedded itself in the iridescent quartz-spackled river bottom.  Fast in pursuit, bouncing and bobbing like lost baubles in the whitewater, the two handcuffed fists of the nameless man inexplicably threaded a chain-link with the marooned blade.  That duplicity of hand dangled there for years; shackled, shriveled rotten flesh, palpitating so near the portal to Xibalba.  The subterranean aqueduct portion of the road’s journey began only a few hundred yards downriver, where the river water surged under the foot of the mountain.  Underground, within its cavernous limestone bowels, the freshwater runoff engaged green, salty aquafers from the distant sea.  An apparitional estuary, the nether-door to the underworld.  

Unseeing eyes parted on the decapitated head of the desperado, pealing open the world.  Though his awareness was distressingly limited, somehow the slurred outlines of shape and form came to mean something to him.  A bush.  An uncomfortable bush with prickly thorns and homely desert flowers, this was likely his setting, the bramble hemmed the borders of his peripherals like a picture frame.  Central to his porthole of vision was the simple sky, an impressionist composition of sowed blots of buttercream and torpid sheets of blue.  It was all too much, too weighty, too involved; it swam and swooned before him like a rocking bowl of water, filling him up, pressing him into the earth with its gravity.  From his phantom body, he felt each toe, each patch of skin.  Though he knew it missing, the nervous signals must’ve disseminated from a source, some sensory connection, or his brain seemed to believe so.  The invisible air squeezed his surface area.  Tightened tourniquets burdened him like a full body straightjacket or a collapsing cast.  “A mountain must have fallen on me,” he spoke without lips a sparse cognition.  The clouds seemed to descend from the sky, fused and swirled in milky stripes of fog and spewed into the man’s mouth, nose and ears.  It retarded his lucidity and reason, soon laden with dusty dunes of bewilderment. The world was a mirage of dancing light.

Then the dam began to crack.  He felt crooked fissures snaking across his skull and body like spreading vines, soon he would rupture and there was nothing to be done. Sure enough the bleeding cracks started to sweat the liquids from his body; blood, bile and lymph, and as they leaked they whispered a static hiss. Gushhhhhhhhh.  The noise vibrated through him and up to his ears, he heard it as though underwater; berating, omnidirectional and boisterous.  The gashes grew thick in sinuous ropes of entanglement, infesting ostensibly the extent of his being.  And through them breached torrents of life-water overflow.  The crevices poured out the viscous distillation with the cacophony of a thousand teeming waterfalls.  There was nothing but the thunder, no room for anything else. Its density rose past any measure of volume until it overcame him, overtaking his presence by force of will. Suddenly it crescendoed and was gone, dissolving in a fizzle of diffuse ringing.  The drainage had stopped as well, he was now presumably empty.  He cried out from the hollow of his head but was not heard, his hearing had left him.  What reverberated instead however was fear; a ping of hysteria.  In absent mannerism he desperately reached for his face and found just ruined fragments, quivering lumps of lips and chin, like crushed scraps of a Mardi Gras mask.  Hunks snapped off as his fingertips probed for a landmark, an eye socket, a cheekbone, something familiar to enshrine his ego but there was barely anything left.  He broke his pointer finger off at the knuckle scouring a caved in nostril cavity in his mania.  “Hell, even the Mona Lisa is falling apart.  What do I care?” his internal thoughts illumed apathetically, for his speech facilities were in white corroded shambles.  From his powdered granules of ravaged carnage a breath of smoke arose, the rubble dust twirled up towards the void, suctioned into the lofty abyss where it surveyed from above.  

Then flames reared up like pillars of plasmic light, engorged by the heat of combustion.  Jagged tongues lapped hungrily at the abraded man whose consciousness was amorphous and unsensing, only dimly cognizant of self-presence. An incendiary holocaust raged sensation away.  Every ounce of feeling was expunged in a deliberate eradication, neuronal overstimulation to excess until the connectivity wore through and the atomic structure crumbled in fatigue.  The heap of blanched biologic matter was scarified to complete tactile stupefaction, unrecognizing even neighboring cells.  Then the conflagration expired having extracted the last of its nourishment and his botch of body cooled off.  

First the warmth left the deteriorated boneyard of his extremities, vanishing into ice like the last warm days of Autumn, blanketing the plaster hunks of disintegrating anatomy in inches of snow. Next to succumb to anesthesia was his chest of decrepit organs, frozen solid in their collapsed disrepair, forgotten now in the advancing permafrost of numbness. Last was his mess of frostbitten face, abandoned in paralysis, left to entropy.  A nearly bare mindscape was the man’s totality now, devoid of light and motion, vibration and sound, texture and touch.  His being was only tethered to locality by lingering senses of smell and taste which now dominated his concern.  Driving columns of bellowed air churned in opposite directions within lungs and sinuses that he knew were imaginary figments, apparitional muscle memories, repackaged experiential data.  Astral nostrils flecked with astral ether intake, sifting its contents. Each unlikely breath was a kaleidoscope of pungent samples comingled from various lifetimes and experiential encounters: a fresh peeled apple, steam off quenched metal, damp mattress body odor, a musty draft from the root cellar, miscellaneous tails of perfume on a street corner, etc.  Soon faded had the aromas’ potency, gradually sojourning elsewhere.  The circulations of invisible current also ceased and without its tidal oscillation there was stillness.  But before its last drags a cloudburst of amber sparks, an eruption of fireflies to festoon the sparse canvas of nothingness.  “Where do you lead, oh wavering stars? Abridge this inked abyss.”

That was when an even more extensive purgatory of nothingness descended on his bleak reality of senseless ambivalence.  Abandoned in a crawlspace of the universe, dreary anathema, doldrums of inaction, his operative reality was staggeringly reduced to a naked impression of existing, as if lingering on the threshold of non-being.  His lifeline was taste; last vestige of a world that had all but forgotten him.  His formless presence diffused into the surrounding unknown at uncontrolled random, performing its forsaken duty because the possibility of anything else did not exist.  Stimuli drifted in and out of his localized perception like a filter feeder’s chum, exotic glimpses of a fully realized world beyond this low dimension, rationale for perseverance.  This continued for an imperceptible interval, perhaps ten thousand years, perhaps a hummingbird’s heartbeat.  Over time the meaninglessness came to mean even less to the erratic coagulation of man, now only a remote ancestor of his worldly persona devolved and inbred.  It tongued the grey brittle of its immediacy, probing the filth and cobwebs of its hermitage for traces of vim, for even a hint of neurological input or residual aftertaste, anything to subdue the mental paralysis.  “I’ve no business left here.  Take from me what you will but don’t leave me in this hall of mirrors.” And at long last the candle flame was extinguished, leaving the smoke to dissipate and disseminate throughout the universe, replenishing omission, stuffing lack, becoming again.    

$+��8��~

[wherestridestheworld-girdling]

The Book of Grey

The house is as old as man, stilted there atop the peak of ol’ Strawtooth Mountain like some frail wobble-caned canker sore.  It oozes the past in fat, syrupy blobs, pooling in the flickering shadow of the rickety mansion.  A villainous invisible presence whips through the manor’s languid halls shuttering shutters, rattling rafters, disturbing dust, snaking in tunneling gusts through room after room of quiet absent dwelling.  But a placidity overtakes the rumpus as the last slanted photonic squeaks of molten solar rays pop in and out of being, projecting themselves through the sooty single pane sheens onto the arenose pine floorboards of the vaulted attic.  These last, fractional slivers of fallen sun exhibit a peculiar quality, a green flash of unearthly light.  Its power reveals the concealed, exposing hellish shades of translucent ectoplasm.  There, with ghastly swimming eyes fixed on some distant oblivion the spectral silhouette, a death-cast presence, unveiled and pasted pale onto the visual spectrum of the waking world.  He hangs by astral threads, etched into the air by the last dregs of light, mirror-bouncing back and forth off the extremities of Earth’s atmosphere.  Poised and perplexed in the ancient attic, captured in mid comment and facial expression with clothes and demeanor two hundred years chronologically incoherent, the frozen Sioux young man nonetheless exudes fierceness, an animal-like wildness.  His contours have a likeness to the champions of mythology, painted in perpetuam in starry nights, a reckless companion to death and its frigid touch.  His gaze pierces down below, across the rich woven tapestry of his heritage, the pride of his people, the endless rolling prairie a magnificent gift from the Great Spirit.     This deadfall bluff of this stovepipe mountain crag which overhangs the beaming South Dakota Valley of the Sun in all its purple and gold splendor has been the seat of his hereditary ancestry for a thousand years.  “In the right light some things look different every time..” The Sun inhales its last breath and the prairie dawns a shadowy cape.

A rusty chrome-scratched jalopy putters up the soft earth switchbacks of ol’ Strawtooth Mountain, gouging out deep tire troughs in the “road” with its speckle spoked wheels grasping laboriously for traction.  Every now and then they gain a few feet, loose a few feet with squealing grinding bouts of pendulous fishtailing marked occasionally with forward progress and ejected sputters of rocks and dust.  After some hours of this in between fits of perilous balancing acts, circus-teetering one wheel off the edge and nearly having to abandon the vehicle, and agonizing earth slides negating hard sweat progress into tread kneading dirt-soup of indecision.  The man and his two kids begrudgingly negotiate the 14 switchbacks, ascend the mountain and arrive at the derelict house which is now to be their home.   The man takes out a sun-faded photograph from his front shirt pocket and poses it next to its real life counterpart, arranging it in more or less the same perspective.  The house embodies now much of the same character as it apparently had some 40 odd years ago, muted discord, lingering apathy, shabby disregard, bowing gutters.  Despite the antiquated black and white photography, the color scheme was actually quite accurate.  The dead grass walkway, dull grey.  The warped wormhole porch, dull grey.  It’s deformed crescent shaped overhang, dull grey.   The bare-hinged lack of door and the sullen blackness within, dull grey.  The dotted clumps of roofing and siding flippantly adhered here and there, dull grey.  The twin attic windows with quarter sized tangle web fractures, its shutters caked with skulldust, dull grey.   The man lowers the picture, returning it to his shirt pocket and examines the means at his disposal. A windblasted and grit-cut oval mountain cap a few square kilometers around bestrewn with rocks and boulders, bones and machine entrails.  A crusty old beater with a bent frame and only two working cylinders.  A dilapidated dusty dwelling just waiting to collapse in on itself, to faint in exhaustion after 40 years of lonely servitude.  Bits and pieces of farm equipment, half a tractor here, a quarter of a harvester there.  A toppled and decomposing windmill frame in the final stages of oxidation process but still with a few of the blades attached to the wheel.  A caved in barn with charred spots hinting at some sort of conflagrant collapse.  Two ravens feverishly squawking at the newcomers while circling overhead.  Two young children with a recently deceased mother looking to their father for protection and guidance, terrified by the pain and misery that this world wields.  The color drains from his face.

Time forgets to remember itself and change has come only with hard labor.  The disassembled remains of the components of farm life have been reinvented, revitalized by a man who learns as he does.  This man, whose hands move of their own accord while his awestruck consciousness merely attempts to guess at the nature of his movements, perceives the building materials assembling themselves through him, self-organizing as if in a collaborative effort between the tools, the parts and his subconscious.  His animation animates the inanimate giving his abode a high functioning efficiency the world has not seen.  His first action was to transform his ramshackle vehicle using flotsam gadgets and gizmos into a mobile generator to enliven rusty power tools, roach infested farm equipment.  Then he worked on the half tractor, mounting a beam from the collapsed barn, salvaging hydraulics from the harvester, bolting on a few scraps of metal roofing to the beam.  He used this new multipurpose heavy duty contraption as a backhoe and a crane to construct a high pressure, underground rocketstove with a variety of functions: smelting and forging, power generation, central household air and water heating and filtration, sewage treatment, his hands made new use of it every day.  Next he raised the barn, built farming terraces on the hillside, rebuilt the windmill, dug water and sewage tanks, renovated the house and made additions: a workshop, a cellar, a parlor, a greenhouse, an observatory, parapets and towers and gargoyles and a large balcony off the attic which braces the view, the marvelous down of the great Sun Valley.    All this, a dull grey madness, a terrible mania that gripped him and like a tide towed him under.  The land was swallowing him whole as his children watched.  At first they toiled with their father, carrying shingles and siding, pointing flashlights while his deft hands twisted in bellies of mechanical beasts, drawing schemata and specifications for their bedrooms.  But now he is reclusive and elusive, spending nearly every waking hour in his workshop located deep underneath the house or in the barn tinkering with elaborate interconnected machines which had come to rule the compound.  Come to think of it, when did he sleep?  At all hours of the day or night they might hear the whirring blades of steel saws, the sub audible grumble of generator combustion or the fuzzy shocks of soldering and arc welding but never the homely snorts of their father snoring peacefully that pervaded their memories of bedtime growing up.  He hadn’t even built himself a bedroom, how had they not noticed?      The crystalline cobwebs of their former lives, enriched by school and friends and family, shredded, reduced to inhabiting a busy worksite.  Plenty of rusty nails to sink into your foot, holes to fall into in the dark or exposed wiring to singe your eyebrows.  They felt like forgotten pets abandoned to play follow the leader endlessly, making up games as they wandered the estate foraging.  Every now and then one would cling to the other, an arm around a neck, a playful ruffling of the hair, precious tiny mementos of a life left behind.      Her brother’s favorite game was throwing rocks at the twin ravens that made their nest a few hundred feet below, on a rock shelf amidst the cliff face of ol’ Strawtooth mountain.  Every day she watched as her brother would stalk the birds as they picked through the heaps of mechanical refuse spattered among the hilltop.  Usually the peak of his mischievousness was to leap out from behind a building or some heavy machinery shouting and waving his arms, tossing stones or whatever miscellaneous debris was at his feet at the fleeing fowl, an unnerving grin and spouts of sputtering laughter were always the outcome.     And today, like any day on junkyard mountain, her brother is a living, running, screaming scarecrow.  However the ante has been significantly upped.  While his previous ambushes had been merely childish attempts to elicit a few belly laughs and a look of disapproval from his sister, today his DNA unveiled a new level of adolescent brutality engorged by a devilish discovery, a bow.  Uncovered in the night by the nocturnal excavation of his seldom seen father, the ancient burial weapon of a Sioux chieftain lay at the bottom of the pit partially obscured in soil, rimmed by a patchwork backhoe and proportional mound of earth.  In triumph the boy held the tribal weapon of war aloft, its elegant animal engravings, buffalo hide wrap and ebony horsehair tether blazed in the sunlight like an unholy idol dripping with malfeasance.  Immediately he scouted for the black birds, giggling with adrenaline, picking up arrow-like objects as he searched.  A twig.  A screwdriver.  A hydraulic strut.  Anything resembling something that could be projected with his taught line.  Suddenly he was upon them.  There, on a corn terrace a step below him the two crows leisured, a peaceful picture of docility.  One grooming its outstretched wing with a brunet beak, tweaking a feather, ruffling it back into place.  The other pecking at a fallen cornstalk between its toes.     From high up above him on the unwound balcony off the attic of the house the girl watched her brother as he drew back his arrow and poked its tip just above the back half of the old jalopy he had been hiding behind.  Her nails sunk into the mahogany varnish of the railing, her heart beat pulsing through the wood.  Fire.  The first shot, a screwdriver, spun wildly.  It whirled off to the right, landing a few feet behind her brother.  He scrambled over himself to load the next shot as the birds, sensing the commotion and familiar with the antics of the boy took to the sky.  He chased them across the compound launching a twig to harmlessly spiral against the side of the barn while dodging strewn about powersaws and tractor attachments, jumping over an irrigation ditch in construction.  Somehow he didn’t see it, but she did.  Despite managing to avoid countless tetanus inducing hazards all the while with his eyes pointed upwards, firing away at the birds, he could not or chose not to hear the cries from his sister lofting down to him like falling flakes of ash.     His footfall met nothingness just as his right arm released his last shot.  The hydraulic strut sailed through the air, piercing the crow through the throat, as his sister watched him sail off the side of the cliff.       “His scream was my last memory of him…”     The dull grey hand peals the page from left to right leaving wafting grey ghosts of charcoal fingerprints trailing in the shadowed edges of the little girl’s diary.  Where once the script looped playfully from line to line, with “I”s dotted like hearts and schoolgirl gossip in rainbow colors, the last half of the book took a utilitarian simplicity, a disinterested futility.  The words were composed of straight unsympathetic strokes of dull grey ink drifting unceremoniously across margins and discipline, drabbling on with inconsistent references of time and coherence.  Certain sections spin out the precise details of every waking second, chronicling the chronicle.  A fluster of depressed laments here.  Hasty words of angst there.  The rare excited exuberance, written down to be relived as many time as the light hits the eyes.  But mostly spasmodic single lines set to the page, acting as monuments to particular fleeting attitudes scattered about on the paper and in the author’s mind.  Spastic memoiria, trivial to all but the nostaligists and historians.  Her father looks away from her scribblings for a moment to the slender frame of the author draped about on the floor.  His dull grey lids enclose his dull grey eyes for just a moment longer than necessary to quench the ocular organs before unfurling back onto the last few scrawled entries.  

    “I wanted to find his body but this place gives me nothing that I want.  The dull grey reminder that I have a father never even asked where he’d gone, didn’t notice or notice that he didn’t notice.  I call to wherever I hear the sound of work but it goes unnoticed, gets assimilated into the discordant distortion of lives on this mountain.  I haven’t seen him in weeks but I know he’s there, locked away in his workshop, squeezing cacophony out of every last drop of his materials.  Whatever he’s building is building itself, pulling itself out of the ground.  But for some reason I don’t think I’ll ever get to see it, my raven has less and less feathers every day.  Today I spent the whole day collecting them in a little half-broken basket I found in the barn.   Now it seems so strange to me.  What must it have looked like? Puttering about in an anesthetized daze, like a ghost that didn’t know it was dead, an unfinished story fluttering haphazardly on a piece of paper left to the wind.  I filled my basket like I was picking blackberries.  24 in all.  When I collect enough I’ll get him to build me wings so I can fly off this wretched mountain.” Entry 37    “I dreamt of fire burning on top of water as I swam below its sticky boiling surface.  I needed to go up for air but resurfacing meant a scalding death.  Things got desperate as the last few bubbles choked themselves from my esophagus, gyrating up to the flames to fuel the blaze.  A fit of madness and gloom sizzled through my joints.  A deadly urge betook me and I surged to the surface in a butterfly-flourish of arms and legs.  I swallowed the boiling tar and it melted me from the inside out.  There was nothing but the sear.  After eons of endless conflagration I awoke from this hot hell in the arms of my mother.  She held me from behind, whispering, one arm folded around my neck, the other groomed my head, combing my sweaty hair with pink fingernails.  “You had a fever.  It was only a dream…”  Somehow I knew this wasn’t right, something misplaced, somebody had forgotten a line somewhere but it was so peaceful, so tempting to fade off into an obscurity of undeserved bliss.  Once again I was yanked out.  All of a sudden gravity lost its magnetism and I couldn’t find my equilibrium.  My balance pulled me in all modes and manners of direction, swiveling like a gyroscope.  For the third time I was absorbed into my surroundings, this time, a consistent reality.  I found my head rotating downwards while my feet were planted on some solidity.  I opened my eyes to discover myself in the reality of falling off the side of the mountain.  Both my hands snatched out at my last chance, a bush bramble teetering on the edge.  One hand seemed to catch hold to a mess of thorns while the other wrenched at nothing.  By the time I managed to climb to safety the tattered remains of half my nightgown were left like a flag to whip in the wind, fraying in duress on the dull grey spines.” Entry 43    “Since that day my mind has unraveled considerably more.  The first marker of my diminishing awareness has been an inability to distinguish the inner fabric of my mind from the external material realm, dreams from insomnia.  Every moment of my existence now is pervaded by a maddening question: am I awake?  Very soon I found time a completely irrelevant measure of being, periods of sustained consciousness were only bookended by the oblivion of unconsciousness.  Waking meant rediscovering myself in a different state, a different place and situation.  Inconsistencies mounted on top of one another until events were entirely unpredictable and unstable.  There are periods of time that seem like years to me but in my alienated state may be only minutes.  I distinctly recall in the hall-of-mirrors which is my memory, venturing for months, rafting down the unexplored Amazon while pitching plastic’s stock to the local inhabitants who happened to be 80 feet tall dinosaurs in business suits.  They had the capital for the initial investment but wanted to consult with their sorcerer magi about the potential returns, fossil fuels had all but dried up at this point in history after all.  But the absurdity of the whole venture was lost on my fractured psyche, adapting to the rapid flux of environmental changes took all my effort and I was afraid that the drain on my vitality was causing my bones to show through my skin.  My health has been an afterthought for quite some time, and now, as I write this in an exceedingly rare moment of mental acuity I fear for my life and this emaciated body.  I am left barely cognizant, teetering at the tail end of a brief window of clarity. Looming ahead is a suffocating mist, the fateful garrote of the greyness.  As I scratch down these last memorials of my sanity I am interrupted.  Presently the ground shakes.  Not the dynamic shake of tectonic plates sliding over one another but a dull growl, a caustic bay.  Evil is afoot underfoot and I can’t help but wonder if this is just hackneyed additions to a jumble-box, patchwork reality  or a real perception of unknown origin.  Another worrisome absurdity is a multiplying layer of cords and fibers.  All around me, as I sit in my bedroom, slithering tubes and pipes snake around the walls, floor and ceiling, coiling around plumbing and chair legs and in and out of windows.  If one wasn’t so vigorously engaged in questioning their validity an imagination could be set to work interpreting them as writing serpents, pulsing and enveloping everything.  Even now my brain tells me to keep moving lest I become inhumed by these vines.  This jungle is ravenous… no blue left for a bird to fly into.” Entry 44

    In a military-like snap of precisely executed movements the man closes the dairy and sets it on his daughter’s nightstand, with no wasted movement he makes his way down the stairs to his workshop.  He moves as if tethered to strings, ambulating in sliding sinuous struts in some unprecedented method of locomotion.  Like a river of manipulated hands, living wires and cords, some with the girth of trees, undulate in a carefully calculated wave ushering forth the advancing footsteps of the man.  Warped midsection curves in the ropes and pipes that line the walls and ceiling lightly cushion the man as he strides through the house, balancing him dynamically with a thousand fulcrums.  He doesn’t touch the ground until he descends hundreds of feet underground, lightly deposited at the bottom of the steps in his freshly dugout workshop/laboratory.  All around him a shivering sea of serpentine machinery writhe in the darkened chamber, churning the black like a pit of snakes.  The sulfur yellow light from the incandescent bulb at the top of the steps drenches the man.  His grey shadow sprawls out before him, a shade of a shade.  From behind him, maneuvered down the stairs by the pulsing escalator of coiling conduits, fluid twists of deft mechanical pallbearers march the corpse of his daughter through the saffron ambiance like a funeral precession of snake-village royalty.  She is then manipulated to a standing position with the mechanical braces of thousands of tactile tubes wrapped around her limbs stretching her out before the numb gaze of her father.       Now the mad orchestra of frenzied mechanical movements converges on the putrefying tissue.  A blurring multitude of miniscule glass filaments splay out from cold steal tips of a few of the animatronic tentacles as they wriggle towards the lifeless anterior of the tiny child corpse.  They squirm like parasitic gut-worms adorned with diamond surgical needles, sinking ten hollow inches of conductive glass quills so minute that they pierce the skull bone into the cranium.  Pre-op field testing is done using computer imaging brain scanning devices also mounted on tactile appendages which pinpoint the precise puncture location of the quill before they are wedged into the subject’s supple grey matter.  The little girl’s body is completely enshrouded in a tangled mess of wires and cords, convoluted threads trapeze themselves away from her head like a hundred years of dreadlocks.  As the spindles probe into the flesh of her scalp there is an anomaly of prismatic light.  The composite fibrous meshing of conductive glass tubes are so woven into density that light fails to breach the gaps, they exude a quality of bizarre light refraction that makes their color and shape impossible to discern.       The machine is turned on.  Energy courses through the quills causing the pale bodily reference of a daughter to visibly shudder.  Invisible lightning bolts randomly ignite necrotizing nervous system chains inducing muscles to fire spastically, caustically.  Her body seizes in demonic convulsions, arching and bending at grotesque inhuman angles, twisting and thrashing, tendons tearing their cartilage from devastating fits of spasm.  Each eyelid flutters and sputters independently like the wings of two separate birds simultaneously taking off.  The electricity strains every facial muscle. Her features tweak into every possible combination of eyebrow contortion, lip squiggle, purse, dilate, squinch.  She bites through her tongue as the piston firing of her jaw implodes on the soft pink spongy meat.  All the while hysteric guffaws tumble out of her in between raucous bouts of shouting, screaming, squeaking, screeching, laughing and squealing.  Tears run down the lines on her face and blood spouts from her nose, spattering in foamy mists of spray.  The machine is turned off.  And the conniption dissolves.         Right at the beginning of the last paragraph, simultaneously occurring in the narrative’s time-space-continuum as in your own, a second timeline of half the proportional importance is born.  Brought into being by your reading of the words, “The machine is turned on.”  At that moment of reanimation, while energy pours into the head of the girl in volumes of voltage, wattage and amps, something stirs in the rain gutter clinging to the roof above the girl’s bedroom window.  By some parallel cosmic circuitry of tandem consciousness pairing, life funnels into the little dirty bird.  At first there are only rufflings, muted flappings like an August wind gently quivering a black dahlia’s petals.  But now the crow is up, beating the air against its reanimated wings.  Black teardrops of tail feathers scatter in its tattered wake, unhinged from necrotic tissue leaving bald patches of unliving avian flesh.  The bird sees through only one eye, the other damaged and partially dislodged as death had it pinned against the side of the rain gutter, overripe for a slow soupy decomposition.         The crow’s world pours in through its visual vessel.  An unmistakable dimensional anomaly pervades the bird’s eye, a peak through the crack in the door to infinity.  A dull opacity of translucent membranous layers adheres to the crow’s sight, portraying a flourishing sedimentary substratum of events and entities. The merged realities stack on top and within each other, myriads of timelines cohabitating the same space like interlocking spectrums of light.  Twilight rivers composed of holographic dewdrops, the pearlescent streams of individuals flow about while embedded in multiple centuries of history, conjoining and disassembling in torrents of globular movement.  Each moves independently, engrossed in the mechanics of their own separate experience, enacting their lives unaware of their images being projected onto a fleeting time continuity.          The crow soars above the hub of spectral activity, gliding lazily on sun warmed currents of thermal updrafts.  If one were so inclined and graced with an inordinate receptive ability, considerable effort could be applied mapping the movements of the bustling lifetimes of the people who lived on this mountaintop, making the mountain talk. Just a moment’s glance would reveal their historical chronicle, unraveling the tale of this mount, a raucous blend of myth and the movements of men.  But for a time I’d like to pass the talking to stick to the ghosts of this land, to the ancestors whose names and lives are as old these stories, whose memory gives weight to the words.  It is my intention to divulge a portion of that rich tapestry of mythos which imbues this mountain and the spirit of the Great Plains, the bounty of the Sioux nation.  Please forgive the hypocrisy of disseminating such rich storytelling in the language of its defilers.   .                        .                              .                         .                            .                       .                      .                .    There was another world before this one. But the people of that world did not behave themselves. Displeased, the Great Spirit set out to make a new world. He sang several songs to bring rain, which poured stronger with each song.    As he sang the fourth song, the earth split apart and water gushed up through the many cracks, causing a flood. By the time the rain stopped, all of the people and nearly all of the animals had drowned. Only Kangi - the crow - survived.     Kangi pleaded with the Great Spirit to make him a new place to rest.     So, the Great Spirit decided the time had come to make his new world. From his huge pipe bag, which contained all types of animals and birds, the Great Spirit selected four animals known for their ability to remain under water for a long time.     He sent each in turn to retrieve a lump of mud from beneath the flood waters.     First the loon dove deep into the dark waters, but it was unable to reach the bottom. Ptan, the otter, even with its strong webbed feet also failed. Next, the cápa (beaver) used its large flat tail to propel itself deep under the water, but it too brought nothing back. Finally, the Great Spirit took the kéya (turtle) from his pipe bag and urged it to bring back some mud.    Turtle stayed under the water for so long that everyone was sure it had drowned.    Then, with a splash, the turtle broke the water's surface! Mud filled its feet and claws and the cracks between its upper and lower shells.    Singing, the Great Spirit shaped the mud in his hands and spread it on the water, where it was just big enough for himself and the crow. He then shook two long eagle wing feathers over the mud until earth spread wide and varied, overcoming the waters.    Feeling sadness for the dry land, the Great Spirit cried tears that became oceans, streams and lakes.    The Great Spirit then took many animals and birds from his great pipe bag and spread them across the earth.     From red, white, black and yellow earth, he made men and women. The Great Spirit gave the people his sacred pipe and told them to live by it. He warned them about the fate of the people who came before them.     He promised all would be well if all living things learned to live in harmony. But, the world would be destroyed again if they made it bad and ugly. .                   .                          .                               .                          .                     .                .                  .

   There once lived, on a remote hilltop, two widowed sisters, with four little babies. It was very hot and had not rained for many days and they prayed to the Great Spirit to end their thirst.  One day there came to their tent a visitor who was called Iktomi (spider). He approached the tipi slowly as a young crow watched from above, circling.  Noticing the two sisters drenched in sweat lying on the pelt floor of the tent, he said to himself, "I will use my empty canteen to fool the two widows." After the widows had bidden him be seated, he took out his canteen and pretended to take a long drink and then wiped his lips.    On seeing this they exclaimed "hi nu, hi nu (an exclamation of surprise), brother won’t you share your canteen with two parched widows and their four thirsty infants?"    Iktomi arose and upturned his canteen, with his most apologetic expression and false empathy he glowered to the sisters, "I’m so sorry little sisters, my quaff drained the last few drops.  But all is not lost." He pointed in a direction. “At the base of this mountain is a fresh, clear rushing stream.  In fact, I myself filled my canteen with its crystalline waters before ascending this mount.”  The crow had been following him shook its head; it knew this was a lie.      "Oh, how we wish someone would take care of our babies while we go down and drink our fill," said the sisters.    "Why, I am not in any particular hurry, so if you want to go I will take care of my little nephews until you return." (Iktomi always claimed relationship with everyone he met).    "Well brother," said the older widow, "take good care of them and we will be back as soon as possible."    The two then took their thirsty tongues and a vessel to fill, and started off down the switchback laden trail. Scarcely had they gone from Iktomi’s sight when he took a baby out of its swinging hammock and cut off its head. He then took some old blankets and rolled them in the shape of a baby body and laid it in the hammock. Then he took its head and put it in its place in the hammock. The body he cut up and threw into a large kettle. This he placed over a rousing fire, mixing in Indian turnips and arikara squash with the baby meat soon to become a kettle of soup. With a big spoon he stirred the stew before moving onto the next baby.  In horror the crow dashed away to warn the two sisters.      About halfway down the mountain the crow caught up with the sisters. Shrieking, it tried to tell them of Iktomi’s misdeeds but they could not understand the screeches.  “Perhaps this crow knows where the stream is,” they said, following it.  They were tired and confused by the time they were led back to camp. Iktomi, interrupted by the approach of the two, hurriedly put away his knife and replaced the baby he was mutilating.  Two baby’s bodies were in the soup and the third had its eyes gouged out, crying in agony. Instantly he dished out the baby soup in two wooden dishes and then seated himself near the door so that he could get out easily.    Upon the entrance of the widows, with the crow circling above squawking, Iktomi exclaimed: "Sisters, I had brought some meat with me and I cooked some turnips and squash with it and made a pot of fine soup. The babies have all just fallen asleep except that feisty one.  He will grow up to be a strong warrior. But be sure that you don't awaken them until you have finished eating, for I know that you are nearly starved."    The two fell to at once and after they had somewhat appeased their appetites, one of them arose and went over to calm her crying baby. Noting the blood dripping from her baby’s eye sockets, in fright she raised the baby next to him, up only to have his head roll off from the bundle of blankets. "'My sons! my sons!" she cried out. At once the other hastened to one of her babies and grabbed it up, only to have the same thing happen.    At once they surmised who had done this, and caught up sticks from the fire with which to beat Iktomi to death. He, expecting something like this to happen, lost very little time in getting outside and down into a hole at the roots of a large dead tree near the edge of the mountaintop. The two widows not being able to follow Iktomi down into the hole, had to give up trying to get him out, and passed the rest of the day and night crying for their beloved babies.    In the meantime Iktomi had gotten out by another opening, he followed a winding burrow tunnel to the bottom of the mountain and fixing himself up in an entirely different style, and painting his face in a manner that they would not recognize him, he cautiously climbed the mountain again.   On the way the little crow spotted Iktomi, seeing through his disguise it spiraled above, reproaching him with angry caws.  Approaching the weeping women, he inquired the cause of their tears.    Thus they answered him, foolishly ignoring the crow: "Iktomi came here and fooled us.  He beckoned us drink our fill from a stream down below, and while we were absent killed two of our babies and made soup out of their bodies. Then he gave us the soup to eat, which we did, and when we found out what he had done we tried to kill him, but he crawled down into that hole and we could not get him out."    "I will get him out," said the mock stranger, and with that he crawled down into the hole and scratched his own face all over to make the widows believe he had been fighting with Iktomi. "I have killed him, and that you may see him I have enlarged the hole so you can crawl in and see for yourselves, also to take some revenge on his dead body."    The two foolish widows, believing him, crawled into the hole, only to be blocked up by Iktomi, who at once smashed up the dead tree and stuffing it into the hole, set it on fire, and thus ended the two widows, orphaning the two remaining infant brothers with the crow as their caretaker. .                   .                          .                               .                          .                     .                .                  .

Seeing the evil deeds of Iktomi the Great Spirit was displeased.  He grew angry at the thought of his children squandering their gifts, spreading evil and deceit.  He would have to fulfill his promise to destroy the world again.  And so he created a huge snakelike monster, Uncegila.  The great water beast was shaped like a giant scaly snake with feet. She had a huge horn coming out of the top of her head, and she filled the whole of the Missouri River from end to end. She was as long as a hundred horses placed head to tail. Her body was thicker than the biggest tree trunk in the world, and her scales were of glittering mica. Along her back ran a crest that sparkled like dancing flames, while her vast side was adorned with a row of round spots in many colors. The Great Uncegila could place her body and puff it up in such a way that it made the great Missouri overflow, and streams and lakes. So she caused a great flood that spread over the whole country, killing most of the people. Only a few escaped from each village who ran faster and longer than the tides, to the top of a high mountain; the same mountain where the widows were killed by Iktomi.   But even there the waves threatened to sweep them off. Many years passed with the survivors barely clinging to life on top of the mountain.  The fierce beast Uncegila howled relentlessly, battering the small collection of refuges with harsh gales of sleet and snow and storm constantly on that tiny mountaintop.  Their numbers dwindled as nearly every day someone was ripped off the side by the sudden gusts or cold swaths of sea swells.  So the orphans grew up to an angry severe world full of loss and grief.  They sought refuge in each other and a patchwork network of what was left of village nurturers.  Village mothers and sisters who had lost love ones replaced the dead with the living, filling in for maternal roles.  But the boys’ biggest teacher was the crow, Kangi, who had tried to warn their now deceased widow mothers that fateful day.  It watched over them like their big brother, spending most of its time in their teepee teaching the young boys to understand and talk the language of the crows.  After they had mastered this, the bird then taught them all its wisdom, telling them stories of far off lands and times.  While the boys grew up dreaming of magic and mischief the others schemed to end this dire situation.   The only way to kill Uncegila was to shoot a magic medicine arrow through the seventh spot from her head. Behind that one small circle lays her ice-cold heart, made of a flashing red crystal. Many brave warriors had tried and failed to kill Uncegila, not only to free the people from her evil doings but also to acquire her sparkling heart. Whoever possessed it would have more power than anyone in the world. He could see deeply into the future. He would always find buffalo and never be hungry. And although the desire was strong to kill Uncegila and end the peoples’ torment, there were obstacles. The first sight of her would blind a man, a day later he would go mad, two days later he would foam at the mouth, and on the fourth day he would be dead. And it was not only he who would die, but all the members of his family. So there were not many who dared go to the edge of the mountain where the side meets the fathomless black sea which is Uncegila's aquatic home. So one day, while the crow was off fishing for food, the two brave twin boys discussed their chances of killing this monster. The younger, who had been blinded by Iktomi so that he had only empty sockets instead of eyes said: "Elder brother, who saw the light of the world a second before me, I think I can kill Uncegila. Looking at her can do me no harm, and you can lead me to her home." "But brother," said his twin, "How could you aim at the seventh spot behind Uncegila's head?" "Our friend the crow has told me of an Old Ugly Woman that lives among us on this mountaintop, who owns arrows which never fail to hit their targets.  Maybe she will give them to us." In the meantime, while sneaking around in the makeshift village Iktomi pressed his ear to the side of the teepee and eavesdropped on the boys’ conversation.  So as the two boys went off to search for the Old Ugly Woman’s dwelling, Iktomi went straight there.  As Iktomi entered her teepee the Old Ugly Woman looked up from a bag full of arrows saying, “So you have come for my arrows and my life, have you?” Calmly advancing, feigning ignorance, Iktomi got within arm’s length of the elder. “As you wish Iktomi.  You may have them both but you will never rest Iktomi.  This world repays those who do it harm, it will chase you wherever you run.” Still shaking his head, acting confused, Iktomi bashed in her head and removed her clothes, dressing in them himself. Then he tossed her body off the side before returning to her teepee, being very careful to make himself to look like her.   They brothers searched for a long time, the older brother leading his blind twin. Off away from the rest of the teepees, perilously near the edge of the mountain they approached the tent of the Old Ugly Woman.   It was a small ramshackle looking teepee with strange designs of mystery animals painted all over. As they entered, Iktomi, disguised as the Old Ugly Woman welcomed the two young men: "Come in, twin brothers who wish to fight Uncegila. Come in first of all to rest, eat, drink, and smoke." She was friendly enough, they thought, giving them sweet pemmican and dried meat, berry soup, and all those good things. She had a pipe and sacred tobacco, so they smoked. Then Iktomi disguised as the Old Ugly Woman asked what they wanted, even though he already knew. "Old Ugly Woman," said the older twin, "we have come to ask for your magic medicine arrows. Without them we can't kill Uncegila, and that's what we most want to do." "What will you give me, brave young men, for my arrows that never fail to hit?" "Old Ugly Woman," they said, "Take pity on us. We are poor and own nothing valuable. We know you have power enough without the arrows, and we hoped that you would have a generous heart." "Well, young men, I can see that your intentions are true.  I am old but as it is, I also tire of spending my remaining years trapped on this forsaken mountaintop. It has been a very long time since I walked the rolling hills or smelled the prairie flowers. Use my medicine arrows to slay the evil Uncegila and give us our land back." But in his heart Iktomi laughed.  Like many warriors before them who tried to kill Uncegila, Iktomi knew they would fail and die.  Unlike the rest of the refugees on the mountain, Iktomi didn’t pray for Uncegila’s demise.  He was amused seeing the people’s torment as they lost the people they loved to the storm.  In fact he was responsible leading a fair number of the villagers lost to the squalls and to their doom with his tricks and misdirection.  Yesterday he had crept around camp, whispering a dead little girl’s name to her surviving father, luring him to the edge and his death.  With a giggle he could recite chronicles of similar such grim incidences over the past few years.  And so with a great swelling wave of grotesque humor inside him, he devised a fiendish plan.  He would let the boys nearly succeed before dashing their hopes against the side of the mountain, killing them in the process.  All the while he would be laughing heartily in the shadows of their misfortune.  His plan was to befuddle a key piece of information which would cause Uncegila to return back to life after the boys had slain her.  He would take special delight in watching their cheers of triumph dissolve into sorrow.   For four days and nights Iktomi disguised as Old Ugly Woman purified these boys and also purified the arrows, burning sweet grass and powdered cedar leaves and fanning them. Then she said: "Young men, take these arrows and free the people from the evil monster. But be careful when you cut out Uncegila's heart; it's so cold that it will burn your hands right off. Make yourselves gauntlets of thick hide in order to carry it. Also, the heart will speak, asking you for four things. You must refuse three times; but after that, you must do as the heart wishes. In addition, you must share the power it will give you." The twins, with the elder leading the way, went to the cliff’s edge to look for Uncegila.  In a rare break in the storm of wind and waves they were able to walk to the where the sea meets the mountain without fear of being swept away.  Then the one who could see found a slimy trail winding in big curves along the shore. "The trail leads right into the water,” he said to the blind one. “Now we'll sit and wait. Keep your bow and medicine arrows ready, as soon as I see the very tip of Uncegila's horn coming out of the water, I'll tell you and turn away as fast as I can. Then count slowly to four times four, to allow time for the horn, the head, and the neck up to the seventh spot to rise above the surface. Then shoot." They waited. At last from the bottomless black ocean which spread out in all directions came a swirling, bubbling, and foaming, and the tiniest tip of Uncegila's horn broke the water. "She's coming up; count and shoot well!" said the elder, quickly averting his head. The blind twin counted to four times four, then let fly a magic medicine arrow, and another, and another. He shot all four of the mystery arrows, and one after the other they pierced the monster's side at the seventh spot. Now Uncegila, writhed in her death throes, churned the water of the sea as it turned to blood and boiled, overflowing and drenching the twins and the hovels above. There was a long thrashing and ground rumbling and fearful noises and mighty groans. In agony it plunged the lower half of its body into the mountainside with tremendous force.  Boring into the rock like an earthworm, it entombed as much of itself the mountain as it could before death took it, burying miles of coils of its serpentine length in its core. Until at last all was still and the waters began to recede. "Uncegila must be dead!" said the older twin. "I'll go and see. Old Ugly Woman said that looking at the monster can't hurt people once she is dead." He looked, he marveled, he could hardly believe his eyes when he stood before the exposed portion of Uncegila's huge, glittering, flaming body.  Then with his knife he carved out the still-beating heart of red crystal. Feeling the icy blast emanating from it, he put on his thick hide gauntlets and seized it. He had the sensation of strange powers streaming from the crystal into his body. Even through the thick gloves he could feel its coldness, so he wrapped it in his robe before taking it to his blind brother. Then they heard a muffled sound as the heart spoke through the blanket. It said sternly: "Don't cut the horn off my head." Remembering the warning that Old Ugly Woman had given them, the elder brother at once began cutting, and with great labor managed to sever the horn at its base. If he had not, Uncegila would have come to life again. "So you cut off my horn after all," said the monster's heart. "At least be so kind as to stick the tip of it into my wound, the one your arrows made in my side, at the seventh spot." The twins would not do this, and if they had, Uncegila would have come back to life. "Go and cut a piece from my body. Roast it and eat it," the heart said. If they had obeyed, of course, the poison would have killed them instantly. "We have refused three times to do what the monster's heart asked. From now on, we must fulfill its requests," said the younger brother. "Take sacred tobacco and make a thin trail around the shore. You can at least do that for me," the heart said next. So the oldest boy took out his satchel full of sacred tobacco, grabbed a handful of leaves and began laying them down, end to end.  It was an arduous process but at last the circuit was almost completed.  The oldest boy took out the last leaf and was about to place it, closing the tobacco leaf circle when a horrible shriek stopped him.   Diving on the pair of boys was their tutor and friend Kangi, the crow.   “Stop!” he shouted, “You must not finish the circle!  The Old Ugly Woman is Iktomi in disguise, the one who killed your mother and brother and sister.  He lied, you must refuse the heart four times!”   Had they been foolish enough to do this, all of Uncegila's many children, smaller water monsters lying dormant in her belly, would have burst out to kill the twins and the survivors in the village. From behind cover, stealthily watching the scene Iktomi cursed the twins and the crow, vowing to get revenge for making him look foolish.  In a flurry of indeterminate motion he disappeared into the shadows.   And the heart spoke again, saying: "blindone, put some of my blood on your eyelids." The older twin went down to the monster's body and scooped up a little of Uncegila's blood with his horn spoon. He smeared some of the blood on his brother's eyelids, and at once new eyes formed, and the brother could see. The twins took the crystal heart back to the camp where they were met with a hero’s welcome.  Dancing and storytelling took place long into the night and in the morning the people descended from the mountain, returning to their individual homelands but taking the story of Uncegila and the twins with them.   But the twins remained on that mountain on which so much of their lives and their history had taken place and following the heart's instructions, they dug a deep shaft to keep it in, and over the shaft they built a special twenty-skin lodge painted with a likeness of Uncegila. Daily the heart was fed with the blood of deer and other animals, and daily it was turned to face in another direction. The heart kept inventing more ceremonies for the brothers to perform. "If you ever refuse to do what I tell you," the heart said, "not only will I deprive you of my power, but I will become a blazing ball of fire and burn you up." Yet in the following years the heart made the twins powerful indeed. They could foretell the future. Their lodges were always full of meat. They were generous, feeding their people with the game that was easy for them to catch. They were made chiefs. The older married; in fact he took four wives, who gave him strong sons. One day the crow disappeared, over which there was great grief among the tribe. A week had passed away, when Mr. Crow reappeared. There was great rejoicing upon his return, but the crow was downcast and would not speak, but sat with a drooping head perched at the top of the elder chief's tepee, and refused all food that was offered to him.    In vain did the chief try to get the crow to tell him the cause of his silence and seeming grief. The crow would not speak until the younger chief brother said: "My brother and I know why you appear so disheartened, Mr.Crow.  We have seen in our visions of the future what you must have just discovered.  My brother and I will be dead in three days and Uncegelia’s heart will be destroyed."    Upon hearing this, the crow said: "It is true. I dreaded to tell you what I know to be a fact, as I have heard it from some great medicine man. I was traveling over the mountains west of here, when I spied an old man sitting at the top of the highest peak. I very cautiously dropped down behind a rock and listened to him talk. He was in a trance, channeling many different spirits who were inhabiting him as he danced and chanted around the campfire.  The spirits, vocalizations of the elements, animals and land, spoke the old language known only to elders.  I heard your name mentioned by one of them, then your brother's name. After that they all spoke at once but the old medicine man who was the vessel only had one mouth from which to utter so I was only able to catch a few words.  Great, Ton 'kali. Storm, Oh-see'-cbee.  Lightning, Wah'-ku-yune-tu'-ahn.  Heart, Chahn '-tay.  Dead, ' Eie'-lah."    Upon hearing what the crow stated the tribe became grief stricken. On the morning of the third day a great feast was given, and after the feasting was over there came in six young maidens leading the war horses of the two brothers. The horses were painted and decorated as if for a charge on the enemy. One maiden walked ahead of the chief's horse bearing in her hands the bow and arrows of the great warrior. Next came two maidens, one on either side of the prancing war steed, each holding a rein. Behind the chief's horse came the fourth maiden. Like the first, she bore in her hands the bow and arrows of the chief's brother. Then the fifth and sixth maidens each holding a rein, walked on either side of the prancing horse of the chief's brother. They advanced and circled the large gathering and finally stopped directly in front of the two brothers, who immediately arose and taking their bows and arrows vaulted lightly upon their war steeds, and singing their death song, galloped off amid a great cry of grief from the people who loved them most dearly.  Amid the commotion and the gloom of their departure no one noticed the lithe figure latched onto the bottom of one of the horses.  Camouflaged among the war paint and saddle decorations, clinging to the barreling underbelly of the galloping horse was Iktomi.      Heading straight for the tepee that housed Uncegelia’s heart, adjacent to the village, they soon arrived at their destination and, dismounting from their horses, turned, waved their hands to their band, and disappeared within the tepee. Scarcely had they entered the lodge when the rumblings of distant thunder could be heard. Nearer, and nearer, came the sound, until at last the storm overspread the locality in all its fury.  Just before the first twinge of arcing light, Iktomi shed his cover, dropping from the midsection of the horse and rolling to avoid it’s hooves as it fled in terror down the mountainside.   He laid flat among the saturated brush as flash upon flash of lightning burst forth from the heavens. Deafening peals of thunder followed each strike. Finally, one flash brighter than any of the others, one peal more deafening than those preceding it, and all was silent. Somewhere a crow carcass fell from the sky, a catalyst.  Seizing the placidity, guessing at the brothers’ demise, Iktomi bolted upright and into the teepee to snatch the monster’s heart and its power.  Leaping down into the deep shaft and gripping the gem, with its hide coverings, he pealed it slightly apart to gaze upon Uncegila's cold, red crystal heart. And when his eyes were on it, this heart screamed loudly and burst into a blinding ball of fire, consuming itself and burning Iktomi alive so that only ashes remained.  From where the village people watched they heard the noise of some big animal thrashing, from what origin it belonged to no one could be certain. And that was the end of it. The storm had passed. For many years the mountain’s only inhabitants were animals and plants.  The Sioux people wisely stayed far away from the big bad medicine that churned on the mountaintop.  Sharp words of caution from village elders, tragic sagas of serpents and seas and about the almost end of the world are foundational rigor of adolescent intellectual maturity in the tribes of region in the following generations.  But it would be a mistake to believe that sage advice from the experienced is always internalized, and so the top of the mountain is littered with the bones of the courageous, the curious, and the rebellious.  Their individual deaths and stories only add themselves the infamous mythos this place, headstones in a graveyard.   When the Wasicun came with their guns and disease and horse drawn caravans they drove the Sioux from their lands, chasing the prairie people from their sacred homeland as they advanced, spreading farther and farther west to perhaps to devour the whole earth, as the elders say.  And so there was no one to teach them to fear mountain, even if there had been, their spiritual intolerance would have dismissed it as savage pagan nonsense.   The Wasicun came and they looked with their lookers, they drew with their drawers, measured with their measurers, slapped a string of numbers together and BAM! It was theirs, a prime parcel of virgin surface area to be trampled by the United States Government and its parasitic hordes of snake oil salesmen in the name of god, Manifest Destiny.  The crumpled paper land deed changed hands many times, bartered and exchanged from one capitalist to the next like a wooden legged horse.  In March a gold prospector came to see the mountain, found only igneous rock and blue sky.  In June skinners and trappers came to see the mountain, found only sunsets and prairie grass.  In September a farmer came to see the mountain, found only hard winters and rolling hills.  In January a painter came to see the mountain and found everything his craft required. He built a small cottage on an outstretched crag.  The spot and the view it commanded from its first moment of realization literally became attached to him and would not let him go.  The brilliant woven frills of rolling hills dressed in amber peat, teaming with an abundant vitality of animals, insects and plants rooted him to the mountain.  After that the vestigial trappings of his old life, foggy memories of people and places, cities and universities, to him enacted themselves in some other plane, incompatible with his current reference.  He built up his plot with the help of some of the locals, trading labor and materials for charisma, sketches and portraits.  Soon he had a nearly finished farmhouse, built a windmill, a barn, and became educated in the knowledge, skills and resources to fully utilize it all, giving him time to focus on painting.  Every day he day went out to his favorite spot, the tip of tip, the mountain’s cowlick, to sit and paint the sun go down.   As seasons passed and winters came and left, the people stopped seeing him in town as often.  His supply trips, a weekly ritual of grocery shopping and small talk quickly dissipated from sporadic occasions to nonexistent.  And when he was seen, it was out of the corner of one’s eye or just the tail end of his coat as he whipped around a corner.  Shopkeepers cashiering for the odd stranger who never spoke and stared at the ground would only later recognize the man as the artist who had in the past traded groceries for the colorful canvases that hung in many of their dining rooms, or guest rooms, or studies.  So after two seasons of no artist sightings the people began to murmur.  Every now and then a stray Indian would pass through the town, looking for work, and hear them talking.  The waitresses gossiping as he ate his apple pie, or the children whispering as they walked home from school down main street, or the on-break tellers chuckling to each other in the closed bank booths as he waited in line.  Everyone had their own speculation on what happened to the artist, why lights still shine from the farmhouse windows at night.  But every Indian knew.  The world had been destroyed once because of that mountain, it was bound to do it again.   .                            .                              .                                  .                             .                       .                         .

The machine is turned off and crow’s spark is once again dissipated, it drops from the sky.

The mountain no longer sleeps; throbbing like pale grey gristle.  The silver metallic tendrils of Uncegelia emanate from some wellspring cavity, spilling out of windows and barn doors, in some places even spurting from the internal core of the mountain, pressing hairline cracks in rocks, splitting lattice fractures through boulders.  The ancient titan had finally ensnared the perfect hosts, the man with his engineering prowess, his two kids and their supple virgin souls, fire and fuel for its plans.  The time had at last come, after centuries of deep slumber, a means to an end, snuffing the world of man in all its sarcastic arrogance.  Over the course of months spent constructing madly, machines that had been assembled out of tractor parts and rusty tin barn siding underwent rapid evolutions as the spectral possession of the man coerced him to work unceasingly.  Jolting spasms of unnatural arm and leg movements threw him from machine to machine, tightening this, unscrewing that, rewiring this, soldering that.  His body, a consistent picture of involuntary movement with tremoring lids perpetually unfurled, revealing pale grey eyes oozing a dirty yellow fluid down his cheeks while his useless unliving noggin flops from side to side on a loose skin-sack neck joint. But this is the past and its memory is only imaginary, like the light from a star refracted by a dew drop a hundred million light-years away.  The present bears little resemblance to its former incarnation, having shed the previous universe in all it multifacidity for a singular presence which is its sole inhabitant.  All the matter in the universe, the essence of all things, the matrix of waves that behave like particles and particles that behave like waves, have been devoured and transmuted into Uncegelia.  The machines that the man built while psychicly occupied by the evil influence of that ancient djinn snake nest reproduced constantly, improving themselves through thousands of generations like colonial bacterial growths.  Each slightly altered iteration, mutant progeny, in time became smaller, more efficient and with upgraded capacities.  They oriented themselves in experimental formations, testing and evolving into higher functionality and capability.  Eventually this method of perfected specialization favored a radial pattern of emerging vine-growth tactile tendrils emanating out of a central core.  The ideal design was a bulbous pit at the center of an omnidirectional root system extending indefinitely, infinitely.  And indefinitely infinite it was, spreading, blanketing the mountain like a feral anemone, like an army marching unceasingly.  Its tactics were simple, devour everything.  Like an all-consuming tide of sulfuric acid it liquefied the matter of its immediate surroundings, rending it to its base elements on a micro scale and transmuting it into more of itself.  Millions of tons of granite, bedrock, solid earthen rock-face was digested and reshaped until the farmhouse, the man and his children, the artist, the twin brothers and their people, even the heart of the mountain itself was eventually swallowed and absorbed to make Uncegelia bigger and bigger.           It grew faster now, each second building upon itself at twice the pace, exponentially ballooning diameter, mass, density.  Now as a writhing mass of mountainous gyrations, its diameter grew in measures of miles.  Crops and cattle ranges within visible distance of the mountain were first to be assimilated as well as their underground counterparts of drainage basins and regressed archeology.  Next was a few gravel roads, some telephone poles, a few acres of cattle fences and a doublewide trailer as well as the pickup truck parked in front of it.  An hour more of rapid expansion and the monster that is Uncegilia consumed its first gas station mini-mart, abandoned as it was.  Half an hour before an elderly woman’s cigarette had fallen out of her toothless mouth while she was pumping her 65’ woodpaneled Rambler stationwagon.  In the thick prescription bedim of her turtle shell glasses the skyline was tyrannized by the gluttonous orb of tenticular spindles.  She was humanity’s first witness to the frightening sight of the waking nightmare apocalypse.     Faster and faster still, the ivy’s reach stretched to overtake other plants in the garden.  It breached its first layer of sky territory, the upper troposphere.  A dazzling kaleidoscope sheen of ice crystals mosaic grafted onto the pale grey appendages as a spear of solar rays barrage the vaulted metalioids.  The sun, a celestial adversary, a competitor for the crown.  Down below, Uncegilia’s horizontal girth transgressed its first halo of residential and commercial humanity.  A single street, six building, no stoplight town, home to less than fifty people, disappeared, their matter transformed into more of Uncegilia’s snakes.  But really only a few were killed.  A man passed out drunk on his couch, two kids playing hooky from school, a woman locked in a basement, a couple of hamsters and a goat tied up in a barn.  The rest heard the hoots, hollering and screaming, grabbed a handful of clothes and left with their lives.       Growth incarnate, faster than a car can drive and a rocket booster can lift; it multiplied itself into its surroundings.  Now a tremendous sight, more than six times the height of Everest, soars into the thin oxygenless vapors of the mesosphere, while subterraneously boring into the chest of the world, already halfway impregnated into the Earth’s Lithosphere.  Panic.  Their factory manufactured dollhouse scale models, their plastic people, their plastic cities and governments and civilizations, consumed.  The messy gargantuan mass of metallic filament, once known as the ancient evil Uncegila, grinds up rock and cardboard and bone, consuming miniscule consumers.  This town was inhabited by slightly more people than the last, still a meager human establishment when compared to the industrial hives of Beijing and New York, with their fifteen levels of above and below ground habitation, transportation and vocation, but a community of docile worms nonetheless.  Their prefab, particle board, factory catalog suburban homes.  Gone.  Their colorful, mall bought, designer possessions gone.  The hospital, the schools, the real-estate agencies, the grocery stores, the gyms, the banks, the thrift shops, the family restaurants, the municipalities, the police station, the community center, the churches, the fire station, the movie theatre, the bookstore, the arcade, the bowling alley, the bars, the Mom-and-Pop gas stations, the city hall.  Gone.  In their place, reconstructed from their atomic makeup, an amassment of arms and arms with potential only partially observed, a toppled equilibrium swelling with fluid.    To the mountain climbers I tell you, you have climbed no mountains.  To the cartographers I tell you, you have drawn no maps.  To the astronomers I tell you, you have seen no stars.  For the breadth of this universe has yet to be unfolded, unwound, unsheathed.  The proportions of the behemoth, ghastly Uncegelia, unbeholdable, removed from the realm of cognitive understanding in which we position ourselves.  To witness its presence is to shatter the magnitude we are able to perceive.  In its vile gaze there is a duality of two simultaneous dimensions, awe and horror, vastness and loss.  Earth and sky have no familiar demarcations, only the panorama of Uncegilia and its all-assimilating vacuous appetite.    Thus ends a five billion year old geologic history, a timeline encompassing all the terrestrial experience of matter organic and otherwise, erased in a billionth of the time it took to create it.  This heretical claim confirmed by orbiting bodies mounted in the vantage of space.  From a celestial perspective it looks as if one planet is eating another, a gobbling paramecium spectacle of absorption.  But at this point, this cataclysmic meeting of sumo wrestlers on such an absurdly preposterous scale, what is a planet and what is just an amassment of rocks and ecosystem?  From a terrestrial perspective the sky is falling… and the ground… and the oceans.  In Gaia’s last moribund wheeze, imploding in whirlwinds of altered being, she exudes the brutal primordial qualities of her adolescence.  Caustic weather fluctuations displace air currents and black apocalyptic cocoons of disparaging typhoon skies bleed violent swaths of variable precipitations.  The oceans, drunk dry by mammoth fissures in the mantle of the Earth are suctioned straight through the planet, past a vacancy previously occupied by a now freshly consumed molten magnetic core, to the opposite side.  Then the earth itself is swept through the fingers of any sort of global agency.  First to go is the geology with the least density, sand, limestone, then marble and shale, finally the heaviest of all, the pillars of existence, basalt and granite and quartz.      During the titanic holocaust, while the macro-organism that is Unceglia feasted on the planet, the fetal ant colony collection that is humanity ran in circles with its head cutoff.  They played with their big toys one last time, hitting red panic buttons in sweaty underground bunkers hurling radioactive model rocket ICBMS across continents.  They brushed their teeth and washed their face, looting malls, churches, gun shops alike.  They said their prayers, executing long entrenched revenge plots against friends and family and coworkers, in the end they sought absolution and found their parish pastor stabbed dead in his pulpit.  They read each other bedtime stories where the good guys always win, tittles like: The Koran, Bhagavad Gita, Tao Te Ching, The Amazing Spiderman and the Hardy Boys.  But as dawn of man met its twilight, razed in a scorching blazing tar heap of self-destruction, it went down kicking and screaming, cursing and spitting, pillaging and raping itself.  Then Uncegilia put them to sleep.          Now the battlefield can only be surveyed using a wide angle lens, we have to trade our microscope for a magnifying glass, take a few steps back from the painting.  In the fathomless annals of the labyrinthine story of the universe this is a new trailhead, a singularity.  Uncigilia, the pale grey reaping blade of infinite destruction, in its downward swing is warring stars.  But before the last course (Sol) in this astronomical banquet of planetary feasting there were eight successions of perfectly perfunctory delicate dishes. Mercury was a crumb of a crumb.  Venus was that crumb.  Earth was half a crouton.  Mars was half of the other half of that same crouton.  Now Jupiter, Jupiter was comically large cheese puff that once eaten condenses in ones stomach to not even a one-hundredth of its original size, full of gas, gives one gas.  Saturn was a frozen onion with a decomposing outer rind encircling it, entropic forces in due process.  Uranus is a chilled creampuff, Neptune the slimy reusable icepack in the back of your freezer.  The last course was father Sol, a primal god of skyfire, bringer of dawn, alchemist of Earth and her ecosystem.  With his last act of royal decree, as the gravity well of a swollen Uncegilia recesses the fabric of space-time swallowing the lord of the heavens, the massive atomic inferno implodes into itself dissipating its energy into its environment anticlimactically.  No black hole, no supernova.     The next domino to fall, or to be more exact, swallowed atom by atom, incinerated and stacked back up into the largest conceivable amassment of robotic snake gods that had ever, could ever torment a yogi’s meditative visons of the astral hells, was, the Milky Way galaxy.  Very quickly it was buried within Uncegilia, drained into the vacuum, into a larger abyss, like the internal collapsing experience of a person string-beaned through a pinhole crack in the side of a spaceship.  The galactic riveting kaleidoscope, a centrifugal whirlpool of radioactive dust and elemental puzzle pieces is swallowed by the swallower.  All the celestial entities: chthonian planets, carbon planets, coreless planets, desert planets, diamond planets, exoplanets, gas giants, ice giants, inner planets, planets of burning ice, iron planets, ocean planets, protoplanets, puffy planets, pulsar planets, rogue planets, Trojan planets, cold stars, magnetars, hypergiant stars, hypervelocity stars, luminous supergiant stars, bright giant stars, pulsars, white dwarfs, yellow dwarfs, red dwarfs, brown dwarfs, neutrinos, dark matter, dark energy, dark nebulae, diffuse nebulae, planetary nebulae, clusters, quasars, stellar streams, solar winds, old moons, snow moons, worm moons, pink moons, milk moons, honey moons, thunder moons, red moons, mourning moons, cold moons, black moons, blue moons, Cheshire moons, new moons, super moons, harvest moons, blood moons, satellites, asteroids, comets, meteors, dust balls, ice balls, clouds of gas and debris, supernovas, black holes, white holes, antimatter, cosmic microwave background, light, time, gravity, things science hasn’t been able to see yet, things that can’t be seen, things we could never imagine, things humanities’ descendants could never imagine, things that will not/should not ever be seen.   Then Uncegilia ate the rest of the galaxies, the gods, this page, me and my universe as well as every other expanding bubble universe floating in the cosmic soup of infinite time and space.  Then her belly gurgled and she burped a little bit.   After this occurrence, somewhere in between the duality of that which is and that which isn’t, whether imaginary or made real by me thinking this, the familiar shape of Iktomi is made aware.  Intact is his former spectral semblance, vulpine eyes and ears, black rivers of hair cascading from his face and scalp down the rapids of his naked torso and spine, ghoulish lanks of limbs and knuckle fur, spotty shadows of tribal tattoos inked within only limits of his reach, tattered strips of a once proud warrior hide, dusty feet and solemn resentment for mankind.       “Why are you here, Iktomi the trickster?” asked the all-pervading infinite, the new god of gods, Uncegilia, whose omnipotent omnipresence embodies every aspect of every aspect, whose simultaneous inaction and action is all that there is, the One though many.   “I have come to ask you to bring them back.” “What interest do they have to you? I can hardly imagine that as many times as they’ve beat you, spit on you and cursed your name that you’d have them remade.  Why, I could build you a whole planet with nothing but wine and meat and tobacco where you could dance all day and sing all night, where the sun warmed your back and the moon pulled you to the dream world.  With just a fraction of an iota of my beneficence I could make you the king of the universe, with stars as subjects, with treasuries of diamond asteroid belts and ruby meteors, finding life’s end entombed in a pharaoh’s paradise, mounted onto a constellation.  With these gifts so imagined and those left to be, how can you ask me to recreate your tormentors?” “I cannot abandon the chase.  In our subtle gerrymandering, jockeying for prevalence, I have formed a likening to these horrible creatures.  Their cunning tappers my own and in this absent substance, this frozen stolid limbo, death would be as welcome as a flowers blossoming through the snow.  I yearn for the chicanery, the scams, the dupery, cons, hoaxes and frauds.  I’m enamored with their cringing faces.  I treasure witnessing their bellies erupt with acrid plumes vomit.  I am enchanted by toe curling, blood boiling screams of anguish and terror and pain.  There is nothing in this infinite holographic preponderance that has ever captivated me as much as watching as they squirm in their sweaty grey sacks of skin.  I want to watch as the light leaves their eyes.” “Your perversity is not for me to cast judgment but your inane wish is.  And so, to you oh Iktomi whose menial chaotic lawlessness has been so invaluable to my schemes I grant your desire.  Henceforth I make the universe anew, polishing its contours into its old formation, humanity and the Sol system intact so that they may be mischieved, bamboozled and shown its own inadequacy at the awful hands of Iktomi.” Then there was a flash and a bang and it was all grey how it was before…

The End of the World Somewhere at a place where the prairie and the Maka Sicha, the badlands, meet, there is a hidden cave. Not for a long, long time has anyone been able to find it. Even now, with so many highways, cars, and tourists, no one has discovered this cave. In it lives a woman so old that her face looks like a shrivelled-up walnut. She is dressed in rawhide, the way people used to be before the white man came. She has been sitting there for a thousand years or more, working on a blanket strip for her buffalo robe. She is making the strip out of dyed porcupine quills, the way our ancestors did before white traders brought glass beads to this turtle continent. Resting beside her, licking his paws, watching her all the time is Shunka Sapa, a huge black dog. His eyes never wander from the old woman, whose teeth are worn flat, worn down to little stumps, she has used them to flatten so many porcupine quills. A few steps from where the old woman sits working on her blanket strip, a huge fire is kept going. She lit this fire a thousand or more years ago and has kept it alive ever since. Over the fire hangs a big earthen pot, the kind some Indian peoples used to make before the white man came with his kettles of iron. Inside the big pot, "wojapi" is boiling and bubbling. "Wojapi" is berry soup, good and sweet and red. That soup has been boiling in the pot for a long time, ever since the fire was lit. Every now and then the old woman gets up to stir the wojapi in the huge earthen pot. She is so old and feeble that it takes her a while to get up and hobble over to the fire. The moment her back is turned, the huge black dog starts pulling the porcupine quills out of her blanket strip. This way she never makes any progress, and her quill-work remains forever unfinished. The Sioux people used to say that if the old woman ever finishes her blanket strip, then at the very moment that she threads the last porcupine quill to complete the design, the world will come to an end.

[wherestridestheworld-girdling]

Suspension of Disbelief

Graham Fisher

Suspension of Disbelief

Here are the first words.  These are the next.  Take a deep breath and write this text.  Exhale.  Begin

       A familiar sensation overtakes you.  Inhabiting a subdivided syncopated feeling, of stepping into a new life while still retaining the first, like watching a tv of someone watching a tv of someone watching a tv of someone watching a tv of someone watching a tv of someone watching a tv of someone watching a tv of someone watching a tv of someone watching a tv of someone watching a tv etc.  A funneled extraction of consciousness dissolved into the rapid rushing stream of your own fluid sensory input, comingling perceived reality with imagined reality into an overlapped existence.  I am the tow man dragging you around by a lifeline.  It is my pleasure.

       Adrift in a sea of the damned, held by a vessel made of oblivion, a battered spherical object is buffeted by the winds of eternity.  It is blown at the behest of consciousness residue, entities whose worldly momentum took them past physical existence.  This small ball is life preserver against the hungry ghosts of the afterlife that rip, bite, scratch and scream their fury until the last iota of their energy dissipates.  The fierce gurgling tide of hell billows like a storm in a bottle.  Inside the bauble, an alien extends his extremities outward radially, enacting sacred sphere geometry.  These strict proportions of angles and pattern have been discovered and forgotten countless times by ancestral shamen and psyconauts from various cultures and places in the multiverse.  At the current temporal relativity, at this moment of eternity the knowledge of sacred geometry is lost in space and time.  However certain lingering presences, grafted into the medium of the afterworld are able to extend their consciousness through ecstatic visions of meditative self-awareness to trained sacred geometry practitioners.  A devotee and disciple of sacred geometry, the alien’s tense contracted body braces to keep the walls of the bubble in place while deep in meditative trance.  His mouth spews sacred mantras, hissing and slithering forth from his ancient ancestral tongue while his body shivers and shudders furiously, muscles faltering as Hades threatens to collapse around him. 

   But the presence of this alien is not currently located on this plane or vibration of existence.  His body may be in the underworld, fighting the spectral physics of demons and banshees but his astral essence transmitted through his chakras sits cross-legged around a sepia sputtering campfire surrounded by the whirling specterous shadows of his ancestors.  They float by his ear, whispering like fluttering leaves.  But now even this reality is subverted as he abandons every sense organ but the twice abstracted sensations from his ears.  He concentrates and attempts to filter out the rough from the meaning, folding it, pulling it out, piecing portions together; altering the static static of this crumpled and ruffled audio landscape.  “Tr ..o chang.. it- ..ou will ..uin it- ..ry to hol.. it- you ..ill lose it.”  The words are just disjointed riddles to him now but he packs them away, to be unwound and discerned through depth of mind meditations for the rest of his life.  Shuddering gales of ancestral wisdom wash over him like a hundred year hurricane battering a lone buoy.  Suddenly the torrent rages even more violently.  They know there isn’t much time.  Each spectral presence gets one fleeting chance to impart the depth of their soul, their glimpse of eternity, the culmination of their essence into a living life before he is ripped back into space and time.   "A g….d ..raveler ha.. no fixed ….ans- ….d is not intent o.. arrivi…."  His concentration begins to falter.  "..he soft….t thi..gs in ….e ..orld o….rcome the ha….est things in …… wor….."  His eye flits open, startling, drunk from the nether. 

    The traveler’s rubbery limbs stagger under the intense pressure.  He feels like he is being crushed by mountains or pulled apart by the tides with only the strength of his might and the grey patchwork canvas of his ancestors’ skin to restrain the onslaught.  In one last tired bit of energy expenditure he collapses the bony limbed structure of the sacred sphere like the twisting implosion of a pressurized steel chamber being crushed by the depths of the sea.  Sweeping away the ancestral cloak reveals the calamity of his present setting.  Aghast realization rips into him like the departure of an amputated limb.  He is aboard a spacecraft.  He must have unknowingly rephased out of the afterlife directly onto the command bridge of this strange ship, absorbed by meditation.  Sirens blare.  Lights flash.  Bulwarks lock.  Something pricks him. 

.                   .                          .                        .                       .                   .                        .                      .                     .

    Computer Systems log: 408312  Stardate: 3401.87  Vessel:  The Sleeper Car  Class: 4  Sector: 890256.43176  Mission: Human freight transport  Completion status:  76%  Cargo: 2500 humans  Crew status: Cryosleeped

Report:  0621 hours unauthorized lifeform detected in fore bridge section, 7 meters before interdimensional rift portal barrier was crossed.    

Telemetry:  Unknown species.  Biometric scans indicate a Sulfur based biologic makeup with enigmatic nervous, cardiovascular and endocrine system functions.  Holographic imaging scans postulate anthropoid anatomy (height: 222cm weight: 160kg) with a posterior appendage (130cm).  X-ray analysis on the posterior appendage reveals that it has a hollow tube-like nature which theoretically connects with the respiratory system.  The apex of the “tail” is capped with three triangular razor sharp tooth-like calcium deposits that have connective and muscular tissue which possibly allow them to open and close.  Upward from the tail, located between the shoulder blades on the back of the creature is a single upward facing spike (62 cm), scans are unable to penetrate its structure, function unknown.  Exterior dermic layers show that the skin has a slightly opaque greyish hue and penetrative radioactive isotope bombardment scan data suggest an ability to stretch a dark subcutaneous pigment allowing the alien to change the reflective nature of the light that strikes it.  Neon blue tattoos (potentially religious) are present on the exoderm as well as various cultural ornaments: metal ring at the base of the tail, rings on each of the digits, and necklaces.  Organism is garbed in a composite fabric patchwork of wrinkled hides that conceal a thin armor underneath that conceals the torso area but leaves extremities free.  This dynamic, impact resistant, lightweight sheathing is composed of an unknown material that fits together in tile-like pieces and exudes millions of microscopic hairs; however composite spectroanalytics show that it has a molecular makeup similar to an insect’s exoskeleton.  Insurmountable evidence suggesting the existence of intellectual species with complicated religious and cultural practices.  Recommending further intensive dissection and examination for possible inclusion into A.L.C.D (Alien Life Comprehensive Database).

Actions:  Initiated quarantine alarm.  Extracted DNA sample.  Sealed bulwarks around the ship.  Opened airlock to bridge.  Dispatched Sentinel.

.             .                .               .                .                 .                 .                .                .                   .                    .

         Initiating Sentinel start up protocols…….x34jki38990mmca3432ljlijsdf98234khvsmhbsfjy3kjhsj2182993cmm…….. Engorging muscle and brain tissue with nutrient broth……. Test firing nervous and synaptic function……. Electrically starting heart beat….. Cybernetic systems function test status: optimal…… Organic systems function test status: optimal……. Power level: 100%..... Switching to photosynthetic power collection….. Jettisoning glass cover….. Removing cargo restraints……. Disengaging ship computer…… Awakening consciousness.

.       .          .            .             .              .              .              .               .              .              .            .            .           .

        The traveler looks down to see what pricked him and in the same instant the glass panel view screen detaches, siphoning every gas particle in the room out into the mid-dimensional-transit abyss of hyperspace.  In half of that instant he snatches a balloon of air from the fleeing gasses using his ancestral cloak and pins it closed with the teeth of his Kotar, relying on his instincts as a spacedweller and experience from millions of years of genetic memory.  The other half of the instant is utilized holding onto the bridge railing for dear life as pressure is suctioned away and equalized.  Finally equalized pressure is stabilized and the alien drifts downward, awkwardly landing, used to little or no gravity fields from nearby celestial bodies.  He peers out the view screen gap into the rainbow kaleidoscope visual effects of dimensional hyperspace travel, marveling at its beauty and similarity to psychedelic hallucinations he’s had in deprivative religious meditation.  He takes a breath from the air in the balloon using the secondary breathing function of his Kotar. 

     A giant metal hand and arm appears, gleaming a surrealist refracted image of the psychedelia of hyperspace.  Reaching through the breach like a cobra strike, advance concealed by camouflage, its five long simian fingers curl and lock in a vice grip around the traveler’s torso, wrenching free the medium occupying his respiratory system and diffusing the air bubble contained cloak.  The traveler’s grasp of the bridge railing melts away and the sundry mounts into miasma.  Falling away from the ship, pulled into a gaping chasm of interdimensional psychedellia by the firing piston biceps of a machine man, the moment seems to hang in limbo, a brief intermission of buffering before the magnanimity of an event. 

Like an overexposed photograph, the nebulous expanse exhibits gross glistening creamy innards

A mishandled mess of matter meshed mid oscillation

Time/Space/Energy coalesce in parallel intersecting folds of a unified vibrating superstructure

Cosmic soup coddling itself in embryonic incubation, humming in the glow of its nutrient bath warmth

“Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and caldron bubble,” it spews

A floundering fly in the illusory stew, a steal spec star ship

Dangling vacuously vicarious

Perilously suspended against dashing depths by quixotic celestial threads

Vacillating on the pinpoint of a precipice

Increase to 10x magnification

Observe the machine monstrosity of cybernetic King Kong

One arm clinging to the ships outer hull rigging and instruments

Grasping at climbable forms projected outward like jutting ledges on New York high-rises

One arm outstretched into the guts of the ship like a bear paw in a beehive, like a snake in tree burrow

Increase to 30x magnification

Witness the desperate gasps of a pale tailed alien Anne Darrow in the sickly clutches of her captor

Her reach extended to a slipping-towline-semblance of control

But hungry fingers entwine absence

    A startling beep and now the heart monitor regains its cadence.  The story teller continues…  Locked away in the vault of the sentinel’s fist the traveler regains himself just before its driving force ejects him from the craft.  His brain swims in a swelling static storm of sensory input and momentum like he was fired out a torpedo bay while his consciousness bounces around like a marble in a tin can.  The only thing that saves him from three possible outcomes of the next few moments is a spacedwelling intuition to stab madly with his Kotar into anything solid that would preclude him from being faced with the horrendous possibility of floating static and desolate, stranded in the vacuum void of deepspace with no hope of rescue.  Three possible futures bounce around the roulette wheel but come to rest somewhere else in the multiverse.

1: The force of the giant’s reach and toss are too great and the alien is launched into hyperspace with the some of his parts being instantly disintegrated and others randomly scattered into millions of lightyears of space.

2: While attempting to escape the grasp of the giant, the alien alters his trajectory momentum but not enough to keep him from approaching the hull breach.  His self-generated lateral momentum barrels his head into the gaping lip of the breach, dislodging it from his body which is expelled and flayed into hyperspace.

3:  Noticing the rare and unique specimen, with a variety of lavish elemental makeup and delectable organic compounds, the alien is collected by the giant.  His body is shredded and minced to ribbons by churning rows of granulating teeth, speckled chunky paste foams through a spiraling punjistick pit of razor wire.  Converted to carbohydrates for energy.

Chance choses an outcome, seizing it from the sky like a falcon’s strike out of dive bomb.  An outcome which rewards the chaotic and dramatic.  An outcome that barely existed, a fresh trailing timeline branching outward from the labyrinthine citadel of the time-space continuum in singularity, navigating unexplored temporality.  In the fourth possible outcome of this long chain of events, the alien buries the spear tip of his Kotar into the sparking jolting motherboard of a bridge control console.  And the lights go out. 

.                .                            .                              .                                 .                                 .                        .               .

      The narrative regains consciousness as our alien traveler main character regains consciousness.  Adjust focus to witness a charcoal grey scorched and scarred hillside burst open by the cataclysmic strike of a ship plucked violently from the ripe limbo of inter-dimensional hyperspace travel.  Pan horizontally as drifting foregrounds and backgrounds frame the border of a cohesive image of radioactive caustic carnage, warped wreckage strewn across the rolling alien hills, discarded debris intermittently tossed among a staggered minefield of dimensional rift anomalies, raging chemical infernos and half working machine parts.  Freeze frame on a flotsam flotilla of dynamic images of the crash site.  A squirming hull-panel distorted and ensnared by a dimensional anomaly which causes it to haphazardly pulsate and ripple, wildly rotating and levitating on an invisible axis.  A shuddering auxiliary plasma thruster in full blaring after burn bashing dumbly against the steep rocky outcropping of the mountainside like a jackhammer.  A graveyard of scattered and broken cryotubes, some nearly intact, some nearly quartered, some nearly obliterated.  Something stirs.

     A hefty heap of refuse shrugs in astonishment.  Other similarly mounded piles cast critical gazes, passing judgment to the embarrassment of the heap as its shrugs and shudders catalyze into gagging seizures, avalanching wreckage from the top to the bottom.  Erupting from the bowls of the heap, the alien traveler is born into the wasted expanse drenched in red blood.  He whips it from this head, tail and extremities; splatter painting surrounding debris.  A drop drips off his chin onto the palm of his hand.  His large alien cyclops eye circles the human life liquid taking in its properties, entertaining comparison with his own yellow gelatinous life liquid.  A bit thinner, a bit more viscous but really not very different.  He mounts the nearest and highest garbage heap with long strides to gleam a vantage.  Exponential degrees of terror, loss and grief waft in galling typhoons against this insidious sight.  At first the heaviness pools in his feet in an icy numb feeling, then it moves up to his stomach where it vehemently wrenches his digestive system into searing fit of artic nausea, then his heart is enveloped by winter as blistering cold deadens tissue and leaves the heart beating erratically like a drunken stopwatch, then the frost reaches his brain unleashing a black tundra ice age as the suffocating clouds close up, the oceans freeze and glaciers advance to the ends of the terrestrial earth. 

    The tragedy of this vision is the master of his devastation but how could an alien with only a basic anthropoid resemblance to humans ever empathize with such a foreign entity?  How does a cat empathize with a cricket?  Why do things get put into and separated by distinctive categories?  What is the difference between a lizard and a tree?  Why do some religions emphasize the disconnectedness of things while others emphasize the unity of everything?  How can there be three heads but one body?  Why do we separate ourselves from the interconnectedness of all things?  Am I You, and are We everything?  Why does the universe know this but humanity does not?  Are there alien civilizations that understand the unity of all things?

     The alien stares off into the desolation of faltering humanity, the crumpled steal scraps, the gruesome gore of mangled corpses and amputated ligaments, spent and strewn by the unforeseen survival actions and instincts of an unknown alien spacedweller.  He thinks back to his last moments of peace entranced around the campfire, buffeted by the wisdom of his ancestors.  How would they tell him to deal with this?  The afterlife is not governed by time or space they must have known this would happen.  This contemplation ends with an enlightened alien question from the inner depths of our main character which is emblematic of the illustrious falsity and dangerous deception of pronouns.  What have I done to myself?

      A tepid breeze ruffles the cloak around his neck and he hears the words of his ancestors in the flaps of the fabric in the wind.  “Your mistakes become you.  Wear them with honor.”  Immediately he sets to work, unfolding the task in his mind.  Seasons of disciplined shamanistic youth training on that remote asteroid hermitage, isolated with the legacy of his ancestors.  Their expressed will dispensed through the tutelage of his wizened master Vrothor have granted him access to some of the most ancient and eclectic arts and rituals of the diaspora of his forgotten tribe.  Vrothor, the last living member of his kind as well as his spiritual guide and teacher, taught him the secret language of the universe and its mastery by manipulating matter’s vibrational frequencies in various ways, altering and directing the flow of energy.  This ancient knowledge has been forgotten and rediscovered by particular species and civilizations since the birth of the multiverse.  However the secrets of these archaic arts have always been available to those who can travel between the planes by altering their frequency, inaccessible to those who can’t, trapped in the minds of departed in the timeless limbo of the afterworld for all eternity.    

    He must prepare for the blood ritual by gathering objects of sentiment, totems of remembrance, portions of the lives he took from the living realm.  He closes his eyes.  A valve unhinges inside the mechanism of his brain, spewing gelatinous liquid into a crevice in his head, coating a dormant sense organ with nutrient batter to bring to life a new sense organ which was drained and pressurized for deep space travel.  This adaptive sense organ perceives psychic energy residue left by organic consciousness.

      As soon as the globular chamber is full, the inflated bladder of thick chunky fluid inside the head of the alien begins mapping the psychic terrain, transmitting the information to his brain.  The traveler channels the overload of data into controlled streams, slowly stitching everything together into intricate webs of a networked grid bank.  He opens his eyes revealing overlaying spindles of trailing light that are snaked and woven into the objects in his vision.  His eyes trace the route of increasingly dense and interconnected superhighways of light as they branch out into root-like pathways, objects that are more sentimental glow brighter and are more intricately entangled in the spindles of light. 

      He follows a trailing spindle back into himself, up his toes, into his leg.  An archived memory tosses itself off the shelves and opens its pages to the traveler’s first encounter with the woven yarn layers of astral light. 

Setting: Vrothor’s remote asteroid outpost; Beta quadrant: 984567.11340

Stardate: 3233.15

Mood: Anxious

    In the confines of a sequestered cavernous crater a small pale alien sits cross legged, awash in the warm glow of a campfire.  He speaks to the flame.

Traveler:  “The light eludes me master.  How is it that after all these years I am still not able to enter the high trance or witness the threads of eternity?”

Vrothor:  “Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.”

    A dark pool of youthful arrogance, high expectations and impatience begins to churn and whirl within the traveler.  His feels pressure pressing and pounding into him like the gravity from a thousand suns.  Disdain drips into his lungs like a noxious fluid, clinging to his insides.  Salvation appears as a dreary detached dream, a dim distant apparition only viewable through lens of telescope. 

Traveler:  “How long must I wait?  How much time must I consume meditating on absence, contemplating the wicked nothingness of the void?  Cloistered here among the asteroid wastes and Galok wyrms at the edge of the universe?  Is this legacy of my elders?  To be entombed in desolation and solitude for a glimpse of hermetic wisdom?  What am I doing?”

Vrothor:  “There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting.”

    But he could not absorb the words of his master.  His despair repelled them like oil on water until one day….

    Drifting among the shattered hulks of asteroids and ice, floating around the locked belts of debris the traveler aimlessly wandered, avoiding spiritual disciplines.  A pair of crater-hewn mountain sized clods loom ahead, leaving only a small breath of space gapping the impasse.  Leagues become meters in front of the traveler until each Swiss cheese-holed bulking mass galumphs on either side of his shoulders like lumbering giants.  Suddenly the rocky surface of the mass to his right begins to shudder violently and crack in great splintering chunks.  The traveler has just enough time to turn his head before the tiara-toothed aperture of a Galok wyrm mouth envelops him and 100 meters of circumference in an erupting leap, bounding from the right hand asteroid to the left.  The next few moments are bathed in the black as consciousness leaves the traveler and he tumbles through the dark abyssal tunnel-like gullet of the Galok towards the digestive system to be dissolved and processed like the rocky asteroid debris surrounding him. 

    He awakes in a sea of pain.  Scalding frothy acid tares into his flesh, digestive enzymes conditioned to liquefy solid rock dine on exotic cuisine, the rare soft mush of biologic organism.  The panic of gruesome excruciating death nearly chokes all means of thought and expression out of the traveler.  Like a deathly static it buries everything in a terrible black snow.  A tiny ember whispers through the howl of the blizzard. 

Vrothor:  “Life is suffering.”

And like a light being switched on, the circuitry aligned and his vibrations matched the frequency of the after realm.  Born into a dimension of thought and memory linked by billions of tiny strands of light.  In time he would learn to inhabit these two realms simultaneously, utilizing an enigmatic globular sense organ within his head, scrying wisdom from both.  In time Vrothor would tell him stories of other pilgrims attaining the light in the belly of the Galok, known to travelers as The Gatekeepers of Infinity.  In time he would find himself in time, looking down at the aquamarine glowing tattooed image of a Galok wyrm coiled around his calf remembering a different coil in time. 

      The Blood Ritual

Step 1:  Gather reagents (human sentiment totems: two legs, two faces, two lower jaws, blood)

Step 2:  Prepare the space

-Remove debris in the shape of a circle 3 meters in diameter

-Inscribe in blood the sacred geometry of the blood ritual leaving one tiny central section of line incomplete

Step 3:  Cleanse self

-Remove all armor, clothing and personal effects

-Fill a vessel with blood and raise it above head, utter cleansing mantra and upend it.  Do no attempt to alter its natural dripping and flow

-Clear mind of thoughts and distractions

Step 4:  Prepare the body

-Place bodily totems near the center of the mandala

-Sit cross legged at the center of the mandala

-Score and lacerate the skin surface that will receive the blood totems using the tip of the Kotar while chanting the mantra for blood sacrifice

Step 5:  Summon the witnesses

-          Invoke the name of relevant ancestors, masters, friends, representatives of the sacrificed

Step 6:  Summon the forces of the universe

-Ask permission from the air facing east

-Ask permission from the fire facing south

-Ask permission from the water facing west

-Ask permission from the earth facing north

Step 7:  Honor the native spirits of the planet

-          Scoop up a fistful of soil, praise it saying the sacred mantra of gratitude, and ingest the soil

Step 8:  Vacate the body

-          With an empty mind incant the final words of the ritual and complete the last line in the mandala

       As the final stroke of the mandala is made the circle bursts into a blazing purple inferno.  The traveler is lifted into the air and his arms, legs and tail dangle limply.  Every orifice is stretched to its limit as streaming torrents of black wind rush into him.  The two totemic human legs rise from the ground and embed themselves into the bones and musculature of the traveler directly where his skin was lacerated, his posterior underneath his tail. 

     Dim discolored muscle memories invade the narrative, human legs remembering flashes of a lifetime of function.  Lactic acid burn from climbing a mountain, textured footfalls while walking through the woods; moss, mud, roots, etc, rhythmic pinwheel kicks of riding a bicycle, salt spray sand prints of barefoot beach walks, the otherworldly sensation of swimming with the current in a river, noodle-legged terror of staggering heights, wearing pants or shorts or pajamas or tights or wetsuit or a spacesuit or nothing at all, barefoot, shoes, boots, sandals, flippers, standing, sitting, crouching, stretching out, fetal position, lying down, trudging through the snow, stuck in the muck, sinking into the sand, sunburns, poison oak, jellyfish and bee stings, spilling hot coffee, scalding blacktop, stepping in dog shit, breaking bones, tearing cartilage, twisting ankles, swollen pinky toes, cramps, stiffness, pressing grapes between toes, twiddling toes, tap dancing, sports, escalators, skateboarding, taekwondo, diving, driving, skiing, weightlessness, leaps of faith.

     Next the disembodied pair of lower jaws float up and bury themselves into the twin biceps of the alien.  The alien flesh writhes and bubbles, melting together and fusing bone to bone, muscle to muscle.  Each toothed mouthpiece flashes open and closed, grinding a groove into the skin for the teeth to reside when the jaws are clasped shut.  They bring with them a whole mouthful of human muscle memory, the flood overwhelms the narrative.

     The sensation of clenching teeth on emptiness, driving tooth against tooth like a knot tightening or the meeting of two cars in a head on collision, the pursing tearing feeling of opening ones mouth after its been closed for a long time, the awareness of having an empty cavity at the base of the head, stretched skin from a yawn, earthquake of a cough, the scorching gastric expulsion of vomit, accordion ventilation of wheezing, directed pressure of spitting, foods and liquids of all kinds, heat of spicey, puckering of sour, salivation of sweet, seawater taste of salt, animal fat taste of lard, stinging burn of carbonation, the pain of something too hot, the bone ache of something too cold, sludging snot going down the back of the throat, numbness of Novocain, the bone rattling grinding of a dentist drill, cold sores, toothaches, bloody gums, fat lips, chipped teeth, electric shock, steel tang of a thermometer under the tongue, hard candies, kissing, drinking from a water fountain, smoking, blowing out candles, whistling, humming, crying, smiling, frowning, talking, singing, gasping, sighing, calling, yelling, howling, screaming, shrieking, sipping, drinking, blubbering, whining, laughing, rebuking vain heaven and challenging furious divine vengeance. 

     That last totemic human objects shudder and drift up to the bare lacerated nape of the alien’s neck.  A pair of mismatched eyes with a steep arched triangular nose a few inches below fuses into the flesh on the left side.  Similar features melt into the ride side as well but this nose is more bulbous, more tubular.  Each eye is a different color; from left to right they transition from grey, to blue, to green, to brown.  All at once life is breathed into features.  The lids flutter and the pupils roll into the back of their sockets.  The noses sneeze in uncontrollable fits of stutters and spurts.  Spirits enter the alien in fuming torrents; the wild black clouds intensify their fury, flooding into him like a damn breaking.  Moving picture memory shadows overlay themselves like four projectors focused on the same screen all while juxtaposed scents stream here and there. 

      -foreground: holding a baby, slightly opaque hue of underwater goggles, lens of a camera and the slight reflection as someone looks through it, spacesuit arms reaching out

      -midground: crib, harpoon gun in hand and various colorful fish, an elderly couple embracing and smiling and posing for a picture, rippling prismatic plane of a dimensional portal

      -background: child’s room, coral reef and shark in the distance, last giant redwood in a museum, space and stars

Smells:  baby’s diaper stench, warm breath inside a diving mask, redwood pine musk, stale spacesuit helmet body odor

.                  .                     .                     .                        .                        .                  .                    .                    .

      The alien awakes tinted red with blood and humanity.  He props himself up like a five legged tripod and ganders the horizon.  A stale night has enveloped the hemisphere like an ashen shroud wearily pulled over the dampened sky. Try as they might, no stars pierce the veil.  The barren gulf of nightfall is only penetrated by scattered sparks of devilish xanthous diamonds, twinkling like fireflies.  But these are no fireflies. 

    With each prismatic oculus embedded in his neck he can tell he is surrounded.  Every cardinal direction encompassed by twinkling yellow voyeur eyes churning, gnashing, stealthily prowling in the dark.  But they are not without sound.  Surrounding heaps of ship debris shift and settle as pattering footfalls scatter and scuttle.  Their hungry gaze pours into him like the insidious dark.  A swelling tide of fear inhabits him and the pale lacquer of his courage peels away.  They sense his fractured valiance, a far cry from the semblance of the known and the solace of nether.  Hardwired survival instincts fire from deep within the oldest parts of his brain.  Be bold, someone says.

    A terrible bellow reverberates from the insides of the traveler, vacating the body through his three mouths and Kotar.  It rumbles and rolls across the hillside, leaping and bounding off precipice and canyon and rock face in polyphonic chorus.  The earth and surrounding objects vibrate with sympathetic tones until the whole mountain sings.  The cacophony crescendos until it seems as if the sheer magnitude of the vibrational energy expended will transmute the neighboring physical matter into some other state like liquid or plasma.  And just like that, it stops, like an illuminated applause sign falling dark.  Echoes die like the grey leaking of fading memories. 

    But the eyes remain, blinking in the black the color of gangrenous festering puss or ten month old fermented mucus.  They cackle like jackals, reveling at the audacity of his false bravado with grotesque chirping, wheezing, raspy snickering.  Suddenly the traveler feels as if he is churning in some sort of witch’s cauldron.  The eyes seethe around him like sputtering licks of flame causing the darkness close to him to come alive with the motion of bubbles and froth as the creatures inch closer.  Their chattering becomes harsh and enraptured as if speaking in tongues, catatonic bewitchings of blood lusting ghouls and sinister goblins bargaining in mutilated spoils in anticipation of the kill, vile incantations of malcontent from rotting tongues.  The coiling circle tightens like a noose as the traveler fends away venturous prods but soon the sea of hands becomes lashing tentacles of ravenous vines.  Ripping, tearing, scratching little fingers becoming more confident in their scavenging.  The rabid swarm begins to envelop the alien, latching on with thorny rows of fiendish teeth, wrapping his limbs in tourniquet embraces, dragging him to the bottom of the flood.  He reaches up a single arm above the tide, a teetering rebellious inquiry to the heavens, appealing to the benevolence of the nether. 

    All appears lost until a single luminous moon beam stares down from the heavens, poised on the traveler like a brilliant silver spotlight, celestial favor, a gift from a different realm, manifestation, salvation, serendipity.  It tears into the layers of the crowd and they recoil with jerky reflexes, crawling over each other to escape the light.  In the haste of the little monsters’ retreat the traveler is able to make out some of their features, filling in the gaps of their silhouette with the aid of lunar illumination.  Black characteristics born of the night, evolved to a nocturnal environment.  He glimpses a sleek black furred leg here, a wispy tail there, a scarred ashen hand with spiked miniature digits.  They could be no bigger than a foot tall, their sheer numbers must be the reason they are so successful.  Hiding in caves and gullies in the daytime, emerging in horrendous scores with the failing light.  What strange world could produce creatures such as this? He ponders from his sprawled flattened vantage. 

    It occurs to him to get up and as he does his blue eye locks on a somewhat intact object half buried by the debris near his feet.  He searches his memory for its name but is left swimming in absence.  The left side of his neck shudders into unconscious motion.  The mouth on his left side breathlessly articulates the words harpoon gun.  Next his brown eye catches a glimpse of dimensional rift anomaly, a circular dish-like portal rippling in flux, floating lackadaisically just out of jumping distance.  He has an intuition that there is a plan being orchestrated by semi-agentless beings within him.  He feels like painted marionette with remnants of entities inside of him pulling strings, shifting levers, disembodied consciousness residue puppeteering his every move.  His fingers twiddle, wrapping like tanned leather around the gun’s grooved handle grip.  Point.  Shoot.  The piercing point of the harpoon and its serrated feathering make contact with the enigmatic surface of something on the other side of the rift.  His arms tug at the trailing line, testing it slowly until he can be sure that the full impact of his weight can be supported.  And with the push of the button the traveler reals himself out of the spotlight, through the dimensional gateway, which closes behind him, to the chagrin of whatever lies on the other side. 

.                    .                          .                        .                       .                      .                         .                         .            .

  Here we are   

Dumped where the shambling steps of the plot have chosen to discard us with disregard

Abandoned on the stoop with no more steps to climb (Wait a second while I go get the ladder)

Dissolved into the permanent exhale of still life

However the terrain remains the same, the same wreckage amassments, the same cliffside quarries

But absent are the players, the cast, the agency, the impetus, the catalyst, the lab rat, the vehicle

The sun has dulled its vibrant color into bland uncertainty

The watch face gulps in asphyxia, dizzy without a winder

The grapes go sour in your mouth as the expiration date passes

The moments of inaction bleed like sores of attrition

The polite silence in anticipation of some sort of expectation becomes too large a gulf to leap

The script papers scatter behind the curtain, dismayed in disarray from gusty whispers of discontent

The audience murmurs and blethers, vocalizing their expanding vexation to exacerbation

In the breadth of a moment all pleasantries and chivalry diffuse into a swelling tide of robust swallowing anger

“What’s next?”

“What the hell is going on here?!”

“What is he trying to pull?!!”

“Start the fucking show! Goddamnit!!”

“Quit wasting our time you piece of shit!!!”

Shut the hell up, I found the ladder.

      A tepid breeze catches a few loose scraps of debris atop a small heap located on the mountainside overlooking the crash site.  They flutter a bit before the light breeze swoons into a stronger gust launching the scraps down the mountainside, tumbling and clattering loose other wreckage in its descent.  The few small mangled scraps of metal and plastic and polymer unleash a cascading avalanche of garbage that shakes loose native boulders and crags that have been untouched, save for the elements, for centuries.  The slide thunders to momentum’s end, depositing the sediment and refuse at the bottom of the embankment, unearthing an alien object. 

    In this capital moment, this is the first opportunity for this system’s sun to get first glimpse of the sentinel.  The lines, the shape, what sort of monster is this? Made of steal and tissue, machine and man?  What rancid sentience could conceive something so perverse?  Only a dying sol of limited influence and character would allow such organic mockery in its realm of influence without going supernova in protest.  And why does it not move? Surely it must be dead; nothing could have survived the plunge from orbit.  Countless meteorites as large as moons have disintegrated upon entry, how could this mechanical beast?  And yet, it intrigues me… This terrible deformed neonate has been berated by the gravitational wrath of my brood, withstood the harsh elements and ravagers but still remains unfettered, unmoved by the layers of our malcontent even to wake out of slumber.  Tis with a second glance that I bestow my favor.  Let the divine light of the heavens shine upon thee and bathe in my merciful benevolence.  Arise from thy slumber! Awake to thy new dawn!

     An organic finger twitches mechanically. 

       Initiating Sentinel start up protocols…… wlkjaoi29q98798sdflkjelfjxxi…… Docking status: undocked…… Initiating independent systems diagnostics test…… Power level: 1% (Photosynthetic charging initiated), Internal computer systems status: damaged (86% functionality), Exoskeleton structural Integrity: 70%, Artificial/Organic nervous system status: damaged (47% functionality), Various sensor array status: damaged (8% functionality), Motor systems status: damaged (65% functionality), Hand cannon status: damaged (3% functionality) Organic interface: fully functional, Consciousness status: Regenerative hibernation, Organic system status: damaged (hemorrhaging from various external laceration, slight internal hemorrhaging, bruised cranium, some septic tissue infected with alien microbiology)….. Initiating repair sequence: nanobots dispatched to reconfigure electrical systems, repair structural damage, clot bleeding, regenerate brain tissue and destroy alien microbiology…… Estimated time until complete repair cycle: Undetermined….

  .                             .                                  .                                .                               .                         .                         .

          Unsettled, among the desert, his shadow leaps out of him.  The traveler centers himself, anchoring his presence to the foundation of this place, this time.  A starting point from which to cast off.  He impresses his mind into the land, concentrating his will into focus like the pinpoint of a laser beam.  The apex pierces downward into the central framework of the planet, undergoing an automatic prismatic splaying and repackaging at the core where it redistributes, is channeled and vented through the loose fabric connections between matter and anti-matter in the multiverse.  Like a broadcasting of radio waves, or communicating by line of sight with a lamp through Morse code, or sensing coded messages by recognizing interval and frequency patterns in vibrations observed in the ground.  Information sent through communication, mediated by medium, registered by observer, interpreted by observer.  But the final reverberation of his communications circle back to him, echoing thoughts against the cave-wall of his mind.  No reply, just the dull hum of the deadline. 

    His internal turmoil manifests externally, manifesting the malfeasance among the desert landscape.  Ceasing to veil his displeasure any longer, it lashes out like a child throwing a tantrum.  Buffeting his own face, casting small pebbles and sand in boisterous callow gusts, hurling tempic indignities and vehement impudence in windy whipping bursts against his outcropping mug.  Where are they? Why have they abandoned me? Where is the voice of my people?

     He arises from a monastic meditative reclination, stretching and opening his perceptions to the external desert landscape.  A desolate expanse unravels in all directions, blanketing existence until far off reaches of spiny conglomerations of mountain peaks piercing the frame between earth and sky in distant horizons.  This is a world of three colors.  A creamy blue turquoise sky with presumed pale peach cloud discolorations spattered indifferently.  A rusty weathered goldenrod that bakes; cracked and shattered by the sun.  The sand, the dunes, the firmer solid earthen make up and all the qualities of land in between all share the same shade of light reflection, the same dry desert skin tone. In the air is a liminal bridged spectrum adhering together the earth and the sky with dusty pink sandstorm clouds imbued with not quite enough earth to be earthbound and not quite enough air to be skybound.  Poking out of these gravely mists are light manipulating visages of piercing spires of jagged volcanic rock.  Each sharp spindle, some the size of stepstools, some the size of steeples are tubular volcanic quills sprouted out like volcanoes from the center of the planet and connected through volcanic vents.  The quills, ranging from nearly translucent with volcanic glass in certain places and opaque with crystals in others, have generally a dark blackened ashy color consistency and their mineral makeup is characterized with a tendency to absorb light.  They rise like towering elongated black holes, bending and stealing light from the desert.  Red stabbing aggressively into blue, blue eating off chunks of red, black liquefying them both. 

        He watches the battle from atop the lip of his own swallowing smokestack, enjoying the distraction.  A native economical ecology between colors like the circle of life, the circle of color, the color wheel.  He laughs and fires the harpoon gun at a nearby smokestack.  The barbed projectile arcs into the barrel hewn hefty side of the adjacent tubular outcropping, bursting through a blackened glass volcanic imperfection like a shattered stain glass window in a cathedral, blanketing the devoted darkness within with jagged penance.  He strains the hold, testing his weight and in a fluid motion of fearless abandonment, emptiness meets his four lofted heels as he descends from the sky.  The wayward world begrudgingly receives his presence as he lands and retracts the harpoon gun, showering more clouds of volcanic glass in the process. 

        The traveler stakes a step away to avoid the sinking shards.  He takes another step and peers off into the distance, from this squat vantage the volcanic towers look like magnificent pillars.  Pillars holding up a pale pink haze of dusty air, boiling skies of lofted earth, inverted ground.  The turquoise sky a questionable memory.  He takes another step and wonders if it’s the right direction.  He takes another.  And another.  This must be the right way.  Step.  If it wasn’t why would I be walking this way?  Step.  Just because I can’t communicate with my people.  Step.  Does not mean that they are not guiding my actions.  Step.  Perhaps there is something preventing their direct guidance.  Step.  Perhaps I have lost the planet’s favor.  Step.  I should not assume I am safe.  Step.  I should not assume there is danger.  Step.  This must be the right direction.  Step.  This is the direction I am traveling.  One million steps. 

.                           .                           .                          .                                .                              .                        .             .

Ten steps: 

Imposing loftlings

Volcanic soot glass pillars

Maintenance scaffolding

Murky driftwinds like

Passing ships festooned with brass

Heralding the night

  One hundred steps: 

Tall gaping gaze of

Distant looming giants like myths

On the horizon

  Wind cut swaths of dry

Deserted dusty desert dunes

Like folds of the brain

  Lucid pin points poked

Through the speckled goose egg that

Is the night, caught watching

  One thousand steps:

Battered by dead waves

Of undulating silica

Pulverized shell grains

  Ranks of the deathbound

No land in sight of weary

Eyes, high seas of a

Timeless fixed doldrum

The sands sift in shifting moods

Enacting physics

  Falling dominoes

Like a creature all its own

Self-replicating

  Ten thousand steps:

It all looks the same

Everywhere and nowhere, stuck

In dead place and time

  The earth cracks in great

Snarling fissures of tangled

Highways, even the

  Moisture of dear life

Transcends these rolling skin mounds

Begging ascension 

  A step, a crater

Another mangled scar for

This parched tan carcass

  A milieu in limbo

Forever waiting for rain

A hoarse voice trills, thirst…

  One hundred thousand steps:

The mechanical

Motion of one foot in front

Of the other, vasts

  Incalculable

The distance, easier to

Count breaths, lives and deaths

  Weak facsimile

To past free vagabondage

Aimless pilgrimage

  A deathmarch toward the

Limitless expanse of self

Awareness, guidance

  Alone in this black

Desert nightmare, devoid of

Purpose or meaning

  Dark earth meets dark sky

He leaves an inky trail as

Wake, mind secretions

  One million steps:

Much shorter is the

Journey for the body than

The mind, odyssey

  Leaping the chasm

Of the self in a single

Bound, with many steps

  Miles and months later

The traveler’s final step

And now the mind rests

  Folding at the knees

Like a pious preying mantis

He drops to the ground

  Among a frozen

Lithic wasteland of ancient

Stone geology

  Heaps of hewn rock cliffs

Of splintered mountain ice peaks

Littered with grey frost

  Infringed permafrost

And coating sleets inhume his

Meager jaded form

  For the first time in nearly 500 miles he stops and rests…

  .                              .                               .                               .                             .                          .                     .          .

      Dissolve into nothing and reassemble into something.  An awareness of motion.  Focus the aperture.  Of consistent motion, rising and falling.  Pan out.  Three separate sections with two hinges connecting them.  The lowest enacting perpendicular leverage against a powdery granulated plane with slight give. Introduce light qualities. The three connecting segments glimmer brilliantly at the behest of some luminous body while the medium of its motion seems to absorb light porously, reflecting only tan and red wavelengths.  Add comprehension.  This is the laboring length of leg and foot of the mechanical machine man as he looms through desert distances.  Add context.  Sentinel swims through foggy mist of milk mocha, each step propelling him through the dusty haze like an oar dipped and pulled, launching swirling baby tantrums of whirl pooling air currents.   Massive crystalline spires sprout up around him like barbed hollow stalks of corn in a field.  His rigid strides, his rigid focus, his rigid frame falters not, barreling through the towers of volcanic glass with minimal noticeable impedance.  The venting tubules seem to toss themselves to the ground in shambles before they are even touched but shattered smatterings of splayed razor glass grieves through attrition.  Grey lifeblood leaks and condenses from flayed organic tissue dripping down Sentinel’s face.  An organic eye twitches shut and the green hued lid contracts tightly against the massive globe it overlays, sending the dripping blood into a tear duct.  From there it beads its way down the chin and falls toward the earth, being partially devoured by the thirsty mists and then entirely consumed by cracked dirt gulfs. 

      A second driblet emerges from a glass pierced gash in the flesh forehead of the machine.  It dips a few centimeters, driven in motion by the rise and falls of his gait, merging with smaller stationary beads of hemorrhage and perspiration until the momentum and mass overcomes its adhesive force.  The drop peals away from organic cells and deposits itself on the sleek cylindrical metallic top half of the telescopically folded eyescope.  It climbs down the telescopic folds like it was going down stairs, tiptoe-teetering on the final step and rolling down the front onto the lens.  It makes its way to the center, asserting its importance.     

        But the mechanical eye sees not.  By the time the first atom of liquid had made its way onto the lens of the eyescope a filtering and discerning program had screened out its obstruction, focusing the aperture in such a way as to bend light around the interference, presenting the object of the course vector without intrusion.  Locked into a collision course, some four hundred miles away across time zones, climate zones and obscured by the curvature of the planet (the only aspect which makes radio-photon projection, instant infinite line of sight technology, in this case impossible), is, the intruder.  The alien, the invader, the monster, the coyote who disappeared into his masters’ ship in an instant in mid-dimensional travel, disrupted and diffused their quantum space envelope, left them dashed and shipwrecked on an unexplored planet and then disappeared again into the wastes.  For some reason he could not leave it. 

       Deep within the organic coding of the machine man there is an iota that doesn’t buckle against the onslaught.  When he’d all but died on the side of that mountain a few choice organic cells, regrouping in mitotic cell division, released key components of genetic memory that refused to leave an equation unsolved, who’s specific DNA characteristics were chosen by his creators, recognized in every great lawman throughout the centuries, with equal parts justice, diligence and resilience.  These last few remaining cells, scarred and dying… regenerated… bargaining with Time against Death, for a trailing sunset in which to drop the gavel once more. 

        And so he strides on, each elephantine step a hundred yards closer to his preoccupation and the closing of the mental circuit loop.  But how does he know which way to go?  The A.I. can’t understand it, it’s not logical.  The heat of the desert makes thermal imaging impossible, seismographer readings aren’t sensitive enough, airborne nanobot probes, thrust into the currents  of the atmosphere haven’t turned up anything, radio-photon projection has line of sight issues and all the viewer can see is dust storms for miles.  How is this feeble organic collection of randomly misfiring neural sparks able to mystically pinpoint the exact direction of the intruder without any facts or points of reference?  It’s completely irrational, illogical, without any base whatsoever!  Call it a hunch, says the DNA.   

.                    .                            .                                .                              .                      .                  .                      .

          Blip.  A soundless ripple of delta waves pulse, an omnidirectional beacon transmitted through the vibrational fabric of the universe.  It expands like an engorging iris, radiating in undulations of peaks and valleys out of the traveler’s skull, into lofted snow drifts and buried crusts, into barbed mountains and molten fissures, into the domal atmosphere, the rings of the solar system, the warped arms of the galaxy, the infinite folds multiverse.  Calling all ghosts, calling all ghosts!

      They arrive in great stringing hordes like riding marauders, moving streams of translucent ghastly shapes converge on the planet enshrouding it in an invisible glow of ethereal energy only visible in an astral plane.  They snake around the southern pole, methodically scouring its various terrains for the source beacon, coiling around as if peeling away the fog of the unsearched from bottom to top in search of the alien.  Nearly halfway between the equator and the southern pole in the eastern hemisphere they come across his frozen form halfway buried in sleet and ice in the tundric basin of a mountain rimmed ice desert.  Finally, after searching half of the multiverse, they’ve found him.  His otherworld ancestors, the voice of his people, tore the heavens apart trying to locate the last of their kind, the traveler.  With the blessing of the local spirits revoked their only hope of reestablishing contact with him within the time constraint of his lifetime was for him to send out a distress call of some type in order to give them a direction.  The unusual frequency of the traveler’s delta waves induced by his intensely fatigued collapse and loss of consciousness was the perfect differentiation, a piercing bell through the cacophony. 

     The specters’ outlines amalgamate into one liquid flowing worm, individuals stitched together in a long boundless string, trailing off the planet into the ages.  Each one separately captured forever in their dying pose, owning diverse spectra of characteristics based on their environment and incidence of their death.  A protracted timeline-like road of the afterlife, conceived in all manners life-ending: sallow asphyxias, rigid exposures, diffuse explosions, vengeful murders, bodily maladies, feverish disease, horrified calamities, vile warfare, myopic ventures, spiteful suicides, careless abandonment, self-righteous martyrdom, irreconcilable belief, feeble indifference, unaccounted risk, self-sacrifice, misanthropic death wish, wasted potential, contented old age.  The train stretches out, a many-tentacled family tree on display in the museum of universe.  It sinuates around the traveler, revolving like a convoluted carrousel. 

      Its grasp reaches out, twiddling thousands of spectral fingers like wind brushed filaments of fur, handholds gripping, grabbing with thousands of pervading hands onto the traveler’s exposed back.  Every inch clutched, every segment adhered.  And pull.  Out of the traveler’s consummate form, a second, flippant silhouette wrenched from the first by the tendrous grip of the voice of the ancestors.  They drag the second shape, as limp and lifeless as the first, into the basking radiance of a spectral campfire several feet away where an amassed assemblage, a coil of the snaking ancestors dance around it.  The voices and liveliness of his people appear to give the traveler life.  His form begins to stir.  Suddenly he sits up and stares into the fire.  He is as translucent as the spectral campfire whose glow he bathes in and its mauve licks penetrate his essence.  He lets it become him as it moves through him.

        The formation of words configure themselves in preparation for assemblage in the traveler’s own translucent spectral mouth, his astral projected form acting like a vessel, a receiver converting a signal into a different wavelength.  Anticipation bursting into substance the compounded judgment of his lineage, the last funneling spigot with which to channel the will of his people.  All the while a wispy river of astral projections enthralled and entranced, drape around the campfire and the traveler, like a trail of pallid smoke, that drifts into him in sludgy, syrupy gaseous ooze.  A familiar entity now inhabits him and his face muscles and posture distort to the subtle nuances of the likeness of that of his master and long dead sage, Vrothar.  His eyes nearly drift shut, his mouths slacken with relaxation, his spine straightens vertically and his Kotar points horizontally at a right angle.  All his muscles seem to revert to some practiced muscle memory worn into their very fabric by millennia of relaxed meditative consistency.  Vrothar’s words burst from his disciple’s lips, hurling themselves into the fire. 

  Night will be over, there will be morning,

The sun will rise, lotus flower will open.

While the bee inside the lotus flower was thinking thus,

The lotus plant was uprooted by an elephant.

        The traveler inhabits a strange sensation as his awareness is further altered.  The traveler’s perception of being aware of his actions as an observer within his own body as it is being manipulated by the dominant entity of his master Vrothar is squared in its extent.  Now the traveler’s perception is contained internally within himself, looking out from within as a passive observer as the river of souls begin to rush into his mind like a rabid torrent.  He feels like the space that he now inhabits that is located underneath a vertical plane which looms above him, a fourth dimension on which his vision is projected, is filling up in fierce gushes of spilling souls.  But their tide drowns him completely from the operator’s seat; a mindspace once limited to an individual is now a flooded room with so many particulate souls that the traveler doesn’t even have enough room to lift his arms.  He stirs erratically, vying for prime position, wrenching control of himself siphoned from a thousand beings.  Looking up above the rising tide, he sees out the gape of his vision which is projected on the lid of his existence.  He is shown moving pictures that he is vaguely aware of, snippets of his past and present as well as some events he didn’t remember happening yet.  They are stitched up and splayed together, enmeshed in a uniform heap of overlapping visual representation with amorphous fractal borders. 

     The mutating display of light streaks and color bubbles ripple in the sky, shifting and convulsing images of him stack up on top of each other exhibiting all times simultaneously.  As the traveler peers up and into the domal projected screen, this is what he sees:

                                            The projected image, the flooded cave of his mind, the sacred fire, and the coiled strands of ancestors all fold in on each other, imploding like a star whose gravity is forcing it to collapse in on itself.  There is a timeless period of stillness; a length of expressed entropy with no one to measure it, endlessly subdivided itself in wait.  And then release.  Release through expansion, explosion, diffusion, reaching out to the corners of material existence until the borders are filled in.  Smearing and layering the universe onto itself into the perceptions of one observer, one sensory outlet.    

      The Traveler opens his eyes and hears words once again being vocalized through his own lips.  They are words out of time, out of his master, Vrothar. 

        “Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft, and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. This is another paradox: what is soft is strong.”

  .                              .                                .                              .                               .                        .                    .

          The sun is a palindrome of time, ending night and beginning day, beginning night and ending day.  Its red hot heat scours the present and births it simultaneously in opposite directions.  Creating through destruction just as it was created through the destruction of a sun even more ancient than it.  Brooding through the ether slowly.  An astral boulder rumbling along the sloops and ridges of the fabric of spacetime.  This laboring hulk is beset by a contrasting maturation stage and a divergent formational pedigree than the familiar sol of the Earth system.  Its thermonuclear fission is running rusty red and hot with age and rage.  The oxidized eye slugs through the sky with disdain, an agonizingly slow pace of a single rotation an earth year.  For six earth months this planet knew no night but the end of the journey is nigh as the plunging horizon gravitates ever nearer.  With its wheezing dying breathes, the old misanthrope arbitrarily chooses a successor to rule in his absence.  A knighted vassal to perpetuate his legacy while he campaigns on the other side of the planet, to continue the constant combat against the falling night.  Sentinel is such, a baptized serf. 

         Come closer.  The requital that you seek is twiddling just in front of your face.  Follow me just across that next bend, over that hill and cliffside.  Your prey dances just out of grasp.  Take hold of it and bite its head off.  Spill blood as tribute to my presence, for I am a vengeful god plagued with the impudence of miscreants.  Paint your face with the red of my fury, become it as it becomes you.  For it is the glow of my righteousness and all will burn before the wrath of my awful glare.  Do not betray my benevolence with foolish weakness, dash to plummeting horizon lest I leave you to the night.  My approbation wanes, trudge on!

  .                .                         .                         .                            .                       .                     .              .              .

             Target spotted

       High among the icicle peaks, at the tip of frozen nail spikes, the outstretched fingertips of the mountains, where gale winds howl up and down piercing precipices like bloodmad banshees, where the sleet and frost gouge at vitality of a person carving out weather wounds, where the pinnacles and cliffs are a frail frozen false memory of solid earth, is… the fuzzy snow drift outline of… the sentinel.  There, clinging with an organic hand to the sharp icecap at the highest peak of the highest mountain in the range the cyborg lawman focuses his telescopic eye lens on the valley below scanning for minute heat signatures. The rough glowing red oval shape with the rubbed away edges of a face becomes apparent, smoldering in piercing contrast with the sea of powder blue hues crowding around it.  Tiny color and texture fluctuations differentiate facial features as nostrils expand and constrict with respiration but the eyes remain closed, fluttering like a bird in a bag against their lids.  Sentinel uses a distance estimation algorithm based on angle and perspective, discovering the impossible range and estimating the travel time. 

              Too late

        Sentinel rips away his hand from the frozen stalagmite he was using to maintain balance and ward off the alpine gales, leaving behind a large portion of it fused to the ice from the skin on frost contact.  Nanobots work quickly, emerging from his circulatory system to replace the left behind cells.  From his other hand emerges a cannon out of the flat of his palm.  He holds his cyborg arm outward and angles his hand downward, at a 45 degree angle.  An invisible force erupts from the cannon muzzle instantly and silently, completely undetectable except for the display of tremendous force on the surrounding elements.  Frozen flakes and pellets of sleet are instantly vaporized within a 50 foot diameter of the sentinel.  The awakened earth beneath him suddenly remembers gravity, emitting a raspy groan like an elder forced from their bed as the top of the mountain slips off its pedestal. Rock grates on rock, scraping slowly on the 45 degree angle clean cut and slides off the side.  Sentinel maintains his balance riding it down the face of the cliff to the waiting valley and the nearly snow buried target off in the distance.  But has he found his prey too late? Night is falling and the sun is low. 

     His mechanical legs meet the sloped base of the mountain in a dead run, his mammoth footfalls leaving angled tattoo imprints of the mechanisms and exposed circuitry from the soles of his feet.  He moves with robotic precision and machine efficiency, artificial movements calculated by design software for maximum yield under any duress or environment. Striding in flat, even steps with the characteristic form of someone trudging through the wastes in snowshoes.  His organic parts fire in electronic synchronicity with his non-biologic ones, some of his muscle tissue is commanded to expand and contract by his organic brain, the rest mirrored through a complex systems of imbedded computers.  The exertion begins to squeeze its way out of him in the form of sweat and synthetic lubricant.  Nanobots enhance his biologic systems for the marathonal tension, boosting the power output of his organic cellular mitochondria, introducing surplus oxygen into his blood stream and inducing energy saving dormancy to unnecessary physiology. 

     Abruptly he is engulfed by twilight as a wave of darkness overtakes him.  With night falling and the sun dipping below the hills on the opposite side of the valley a sharp division bisects the light and the dark.  The photonic frontlines advance at a marching rate that the sentinel labors impossibly to match.  Racing out before him is the absorbing evening, flying towards the wicked intruder, the vengeful zenith of his quest.  With every step he takes, the night takes ten.  The sun merciless in its impatience.  It will not postpone its slumber much longer. 

      An act of desperation dispatches him into the realm of reckless abandonment and he bounds over an impeding snowdrift in a titanic leap disregarding the factory recommendations of his model.  Red and yellow flashing caution signs blare and his neural implant itemizes long streaming columns of figures and calculations on his retinal display, logically pleading with him to abscond this foolish hurdling.  Data trend programs indicate this current course of action is consuming too much energy, a suicidal pace, reaching the target in time is an insurmountable goal.  But the hunter-gatherer instincts from his human genetic memory cannot submit with the prey is so nearly within grasp.  So he repeatedly vaults the landscape swimming through the distance in the air.  With every saltate something speaks into his mind just over this next bluff, just over this boulder, just over this ridge, just don’t quit.  He feels a catatonic insanity overtake him, a valiant deathwish, a legendary cynicism, transcendence. 

  What is left of me but this task?

        Suddenly his body fails him and he crashes to the earth unconscious, limbs flailing and splaying in all directions like leaves in the wind.  When he hits the ground his sprawl spits plumes of snow spraying up into the fresh night.  Some of it lands on the chapped and barely exposed face of the traveler, almost entombed in snow and ice, only a few hundred feet away while marching darkness passes over him.  And the sun is disappointed by the failure. 

          In the shame of defeat the sun tosses out its loosing ticket like a gambler at the track.  It flips the game board upside down, discharging a death rain of cosmic radiation, a solar flare tinged with equal parts disdain and contempt.  It shoots from its surface like a dreadnaught, an angel of death, a bellowing dragon.  The arc of light and flame whips towards the planet in a horrendous swallowing blitzkrieg.  A policy of scorched earth

Smoldering cinders and alkaline ashes

Igneous flesh and dilapidated frays

In blood soaked horror the victim recoils

Into and unto herself, while her topography is mangled and mutilated

Holding a quiet reverie inside the withdrawn dormancy of respite

A cloister vigil of reassurance, some desolate words, an unheard prayer

While the fire winds of hell pound against her outer crust

Festering demons breathe breathless curses that ooze into broken scabs in sickening vile bursts

Her voice rings out from within, rising up and out to meet the flaming cavalcade with a raised fist and an iron brow

Will the onslaught never cease?!

What grievance have I made?

What err of character?

I bequeath thee! List thy record of infringed trespasses!

Her agonizing wails drip out of her, showering the abyss until at last her fury dissipates

Into a sullen apathy of an innocent casualty

With a deathly shrug she sheds her destitute husk

Rebirth through the passing of a generation

Sprouting in graveyard dirt, tarnished decay and liquefying detritus

Her final act a death rattle, breathing life into life

She pairs the sigh with tributaries of tears

  .                     .                       .                        .                         .                      .                       .                      .             .

         The rain and night seemed to fall for an eternity, turning the vapid plane of the aboveground world into a dark falling ocean.  The massive drenching drops were so tightly fit together that the air appeared to liquefy.  And the thirsty desert sand and rock lapped it up with an unquenchable appetite.  Ground buried by snow and ice for a thousand years had only an instant of baldness before the mass of water tossed into the sky by the heat of the solar flare came crashing down with all the force of a cataclysmic strike.  The mountains melted, spontaneous rivers and torrents spewed titanic boulders in all manners of diffusion, filing down hillsides, cliffs and jagged crags.  Mighty rivers converged, leveling everything.  No geographic landmarks opposed this great aquatic diaspora.  

       In all this, the traveler endured.  He awoke before he was drowned and weathered the storm by yielding to the violence of the land; seeking shelter before it was washed away, constantly mounting the highest available ground and in the end, when nothing solid remained, he stayed afloat, in awe of nature’s magnificent power.  And in the midst of this life and death struggle for survival, through the storm and the endless night he kept watch.  A constant vigilance on the horizon, no idea that just minutes before he regained consciousness his advisory lay only a few hundred feet away, still in exhaustion.  Because somewhere in his subconscious he knew something was lurking, hunting him in the darkness.  It had always been. 

       Eventually the mania sick and wobbly delirium of the storm suspended its onfall, tapering off the great migration of water, dissipating into freshly hewn watersheds and basins.  The thundering drone of rain relinquishes the audio majority to the numb white noise of effervescent streams and rivers.  The aquatic exodus’, rousing from melting snow, escaping into water vapor and pouring back down onto the land, next leg of the journey is drainage.  The brute of the flood soaks into the cracks and crevices in between sand grains and limestone creases and crumpled rock sending the tide below the surface.  Subterranean catacombs become pooling aquifers deep in the belly of the planet.  In some places water soluble minerals erode into mud causing some caverns and empty pockets to crumple in on itself shuffling the above ground terrain as well.   The shifting earth unveils massive crystalline structures previously buried in the desert.  They twinkle prismaticly, glinting with a slight rosy pink hue in the rising sun.

       Located within the influence of the upheavals, the traveler copes with the hastened geologic activity, constantly acclimating to tactically advantageous positions and watching for landslides and tectonic shudders.  He notices little patches of the earth stirring all around him as the sun births anew in the opposing horizon.  The first rays after an enduring night of soul-wrenching torrents bursts life into being.  A new chroma to the sepia palate of the desert.  The verdant phosphorescence of sprouting vitality.  Botany green.  The traveler takes it all in with panoramic eyes. 

  First born:

Flora:  Thin tangled strips of orange and purplish grasses pop up from knee high running riverbeds and tide pools.  Sporadic patches of what a moment ago appeared to be fist sized rocks on the river bottom split open, poke out tiny green leafed shoots.  Intermittent ropes of thorny vines reach outward from these pools of water with spindly black tendrils corkscrewing around their environment, rapidly growing and entwining together to form complex knots.  Still left uncovered is a complex network of interconnected tubers and root bulbs expanding, implementing the nourishment which has sifted down from the surface through gradient drainage.

Insects:  Desert dormant insect eggs unearthed by the flood hatch the instant the water touches them, unleashing schools of nearly translucent swimming larval pupae wiggling against the throws of the current.  They feed on microorganisms, the sunlight, the plants and each other nourishing their forming bodies as their secondary life stage constructs itself inside, which will burst out from within when complete.  Nearly dead and dug in water beetles rejoice as the hell of the dry dusty earth mutates into a paradise of mud, muck and swamp; they skip luxuriously on the water’s surface. 

Reptiles:  Tan speckled scales of all manners of alien lizard and gecko blend perfectly into the mucky shoals of the drainage basin, the only divulgence is the batting of their fire sliced irises in consistent intervals.  Here and there a heterogeneity of the stunted slinking cords of snake tails weave in and out of the water leaving pale tubes of outgrown skin and corrugated sand trails in their wake.

Fauna: Squirming clouds of protoform amphibious wrigglers engage the larval insects of roughly the same size for the tenuous resources of the pond and stream river bottoms with the biggers swallowing the littlers.  Fast growing and scarlet tinged, water-native shrimp and prickle-toothed guppies hunt in tandem pairs, gorging on the smaller, temporary aquatics in swooning dives through their dense conglomerations.  Adding to the feeding frenzy chaos, stilting among the reeds, needle beaked wading birds dart their mouths into the primordial organic soup, each calculated scoop enveloping a plethora of aquatic diversity.

  Middle children:

Flora:  Where once thin strips of orange and purple verdure lined the arteries of the water bodies, now huge brambles of the erupting brush push themselves out of the water and invade the dry empty medians, devouring the emptiness.  The small viridian rock sprouts can now be visibly seen springing up towards the sky, spearing out at slight angles and braiding into each other forming sporadic island thickets of compacted vegetation.  Having conquered the lateral plane, nearly blanketing all the available territory, the thorny black vines build up and out; ropes ballooning to beams, thorns tapering to scythes, groundcover compiling to nearly waist high and bulbous pods wrapped in shrouding folds begin to bud in intermittent botanic expenditures.  The underground superhighways of interconnected tubule root systems swell in magnitude with time and nutrition, pushing up through the ground in some places and exhibiting initial characteristics of self-awareness by sensing its environment and communicating across the network, predicting growth deficiencies and compensating, even releasing toxins in some places to thwart predators.  Alongside this superorganism a porous yellow fungal parasite shadows its host developing in quiet synchronicity, undetected as of yet but leaching energy. 

Insects:  A decimated cast of Darwinian selected and matured larvae float to the water’s surface to perish, from their battle scarred and fattened carapace spills out the slick folded stick features of their next evolutionary form; winged monstrosities crowd the air in diverse genetic variations.  Horrendous gyrating colonies of millions of hairy arachnids crawl all over each other, eventually leaping off the moving island of their mother’s back, trailing behind them long lifelines of silk spindles.  Stabbing stinger adorned insectoids, resulting from a multifarious spectrum of hybridal evolutionary adaptations team over the vegetation and swamp terrain with drumming rows of pointed legs, dueling with competitors for survival with menacing pincers, ravaging needles of fangs and poison spurting quills.  Massive beetle elders, inert in dormancy, dug in deep; far below the surface awaken from the frenzied commotion of the waking desert and tunnel toward the shallows, consuming organic flora and fauna and insects in their ascent. 

Reptiles:  The majority of the coldbloods leave the hotblooded hysteria to devour itself, basking in the solace of camouflage and obscurity, lurking on the periphery to mop up the deserters.  The smaller snakes and lizards rely on the intelligence of their ancient genetic memory to replicate their gene pool, following age old methods of self-preservation; sneaking, hiding, being cautious.  However, the larger creatures of the reptilian genus need not fear the cataclysm of ecological warfare for their adaptations have put them at the pinnacle of the genetic arms race.  Long lithe armor-scaled dinosaurs slink through waterways with just the slits of their ophidian eyes breaching the surface, cataloging the potential menu, selecting a delectable dish and dragging it under to be feasted upon.  Their land based kin gallop across the theater of war, sometimes on two legs, sometimes on up to six, thrusting themselves up into the air with the aid of the thin membranous protoform wings, descending on unsuspecting prey with rapturous bouquets of lacerating talons. 

Fauna:  Amphibian, avian and mammalian biodiversity explodes.  What started as millions of amphibian eggs which then was reduced to thousands of tadpoles by predators has now resulted in only a few hundred caecilian variations; they entrench themselves in the muck in a nearly futile attempt to prevent extinction.  The swarms of tiny fish and shrimp have been poached to critical levels by a larger, more dominant species of fish that hunts as an amorphous blob of carnassials and brutality, coordinating with a hive mind, mob mentality.  Diving and swooping in fantastic aerial acrobatic displays of predation, multiform amalgamations of colorful flying creatures snatch up breakfast, lunch and dinner; shredding it with hooked nails and picking it apart.  Below the skyward dogfights, mammoth hulks of tortile horned and bone-plated giants forage among the carnage, munching on plants and shovel-nosing the earth for tubers and roots, unperturbed in their gigantism by the ensuing butchery.  Around them, lapping precariously at the shores of the enamored watering holes are the equine shapes of planes quadrupeds; they group in familial herds, some watching for danger, others nervously drinking.  Boisterously sloshing and slopping in the mud and slush, also on the riverbank, are iron-tusked crusty hogs; too portly to be hunted except for the biggest of the carnivores.  Poking their heads out of their burrows to scan for threats are the danger-delirious, paranoid eyes of scurrying vermin, their pink noses inspire rapidly.  While some species evolve various methods of self-preservation involving offensive prowess or invisibility through camouflage or unmatched speed, in others natural selection has pursued an alternate course involving none of these characteristics: defense.  A pincushion bundle of poised needles splay outward omnidirectionally, threatening attackers with piercing spines that can be launched at will; it undulates in wave-like writhes, advancing forward by pushing thousands of hairy little feet against the ground in pulses.  

The babies: 

Flora:  With the landscape changing rapidly as the plants spread to inhabit all the available land, nearly all the exposed land has been taken over.  The marshy swamps have turned into a lively tropical jungle, an ideal habitat for a macrorganism megaflora.  The primitive neural network of interconnected root systems and sympathetic electrical impulses of the previous incarnation has become an advanced intelligence connecting flora of all kinds into one all-encompassing jungle consciousness.  It coordinates its defenses against the herbivores and omnivores alike, ensnaring them with vines, poisoning them with thorns, paralyzing them with toxic spores.  Its allies are coerced insects that till the soil, pollinate the flowers, digest the detritus and it rewards them with sweet syrupy fruit and animal corpses.  The jungle believes that it acts in its own interest, multiplying itself, serving nothing, but the parasitic yellow fungus growing symbiotically, still undetectable.  The yellow fungus is a ghostly puppet master within the neural network, a split personality, invisibly directing the consciousness to conduct life force energy towards the giant mysterious pinkish crystals that litter the landscape above ground and below.  Its intentions are shrouded in subtlety but a grotesque atmosphere, a malevolent characteristic of those who hunger and thirst for death, encompass its every manipulation.   

Insects:  The previous generations of insectoids have been nearly eliminated in the feverish race to consume or be consumed; the species remaining are either to formidable to be eaten or are under the protection and patronage of the jungle, jolly punchdrunk slaves to sylvan whims.  Free from the jungle’s meddling clutches are the huge descendants of the ancient burrower beetles, now doubled in size and intelligence.  They communicate with each other through hisses and pheromones, coordinating intermittent campaigns from labyrinthine underground fortresses.  Gushing forth from the ground in emergence holes, they subvert and annihilate enemy combatants that endanger their immense subterranean beetle civilization located in their holy city of Sissvizzerce. 

Reptiles:  As is the trend in this new era of intelligent warfare and perilous natural selection, only the largest and most creative reptiles have survived.  When the jungles swallowed the lakes and ponds and rivers even the most successful aquatic reptiles were swallowed as well.  Those that persevered were forced in only a few generations to achieve flight with their primordial wings and take to the sky where competition was less crushing.  And then a further elimination of ineffectual traits occurred as the lofted lizards waged ceaseless warfare against the avian races for air supremacy, extinguishing millions of their contemporaries.  What remains of the reptile’s genus is a loose coalition of tribal matriarchies; only a few hundred of dragon-like scale-clad warriors endure, perpetually patrolling the sky. 

Fauna:  With the explosion of mammalian diversity in the previous era, its inertia inverts and implodes into a constricting funnel of only a few species.  Out of millions of organisms only a few thousand remain and of them only one bears any real importance to this story.  Like bumbling mountains they roam the jungles, their gargantuan hulk brushing over trees and boulders and root clusters, everything.  They loom, foreboding offspring of epic ancestry, a species who had to evolve by growing bigger and bigger to compensate for massive predators.  They present archaic weapons of war, ornamenting their skulls in racks of skeletal truncheon antlers, branching off in tapering arms from a radial center to ward off the ghosts of those who made it necessary to grow them.  The echoes of their slow thundering hooves can be heard for miles, taunting the jungle and the downtrodden vegetation they leave in their wake.  There’s nothing to be done, they’re too big for this world. 

.                     .                             .                           .                             .                         .                        .                       .

         But what of the traveler? And of the Sentinel? There’s a prophecy to fulfill and story to conclude.  Where is this neat and tidy ending that my brain can’t help but yearn for?  A sense of completion, the end of the line, the fat lady singing, the kiss goodbye, stepping back and seeing that all the puzzle pieces are in place, the eulogy, the closing credits, the final course, the smell of home, the comfort of bed sheets, the knockout punch, the will, the summary, the recap, the final step, the waking up and finding out that it was all a dream, the realization, the end of time, the copout, the sentencing, the blowhole, the butt, the rind, the crumbs, the delaying the inevitable, the vacillation, the procrastination, the wheeze, the roach, the descent into old age, the over the hill,  the graduation, the fade to black, the reflex, the execution, the dramatic pause, the applause, the impolite mimicry, the advertisements, the jump out of the plane, the key, the terminus, the top floor, the bottom floor, the victory lap, the terminal velocity, the precipitous edge, the divorce, the marriage, the finishing touches, the inevitable, the takeoff, the touchdown, the reentry, the solution, the brunt, the wrap it up, the point, the point of no return, the wasted life, the sigh, the suicide, the punch line, the fringe of existence, the vapor trail, the murder, the blackout, the completed repairs, the return to the tonic center, the funeral, the last leg of the journey, the last mile, the last breath, the last pitch, the last shot, the last point, the last dregs, the last brick, the last echo, the last bastion, the last Indian, the last tree, the last unblemished mind, the last nail in the coffin, the last ingredient, the last beer, the last photon, the last fleeting look, the last can of beans, the last brush stroke, the last pushup, the last sunset, the last smile, the last laugh, the last word? 

         Truth is... I don’t know how to end this, here are some ideas.  Pick your own. 

  The creatures overwhelm the Sentinel.  The traveler is grabbed by the foot in mid portal transit and the portal closes around his legs and Kotar, amputating them.  The traveler crawls to the edge of a cliff just before he is overwhelmed.  He throws himself off and it appears as though he falls to his death.  The narrative focuses on the sun until the outline of the main character flapping freshly emerged wings hidden in his Sikth flies off into the sunset.

The traveler is taught by the spirit of the planet the nature of existence.  He meditates with the ghosts of his ancestors and they teach him more secrets of the universe.  He travels through time and space with his mind at will, observing the rise and fall of countless alien civilizations.  Eventually he attains enlightenment and becomes one with it all.

Sentinel awakes and catches the traveler, destroying him and rending his limbs.  His nanobots feed on the matter of the planet, multiplying themselves indefinitely, eventually consuming other planets and then other systems and then other galaxies and then the whole universe.  When nothing exists in the whole universe but nanobots they splay open the fabric of space and pour into other dimensions, consuming everything.  The combined gods from all the universes try to stop them but fail.   

What is an ending, but the birth of something new?

[wherestridestheworld-girdling]

What joy in confinement

What joy in confinement

Oh! the benevolent umbrage of padded walls

The salacious sanctity of sky mounted brickface,

Rising out of the earth like alphabetized and coded manila folder dividers,

Inhibit my blasphemy, these voracious snarls of self-discretion

I betroth Thee!

Wed into me thy gift of ultimate bondage

Oh how I wish to be ensnared

To feel the cold metal teeth of a bear trap in my flesh

To be pushed and crushed and crammed into the ecstasy of a solitary cell

Flood my lungs with fluid for even the void of my breath is too liberating

I crave debilitation and sloth

Annihilation through inaction

Steal from me, my thoughts, my actions

Liberate me of my consciousness, my sentiency

Their lightness pins me to the ground

Let me fly with wings of shackles and chains

Let lack inhume me and fill the hollow of my bones

I palpitate in perspiration, enraptured as each shovel full of earth buries me a little more

Just a little more and I will never have to see that ghastly sun again

A freedom through entombment

Take me away

[wherestridestheworld-girdling]

And here we are again, the blank screen…

    Past the heavens and hells of Earth, past the sky and the sun and the moon and stars, past the gaze of the gazer and the dreams of the dreamer, there, amongst the realm of giants and primal elementals screams a magnificent monster.  The comet, captured by gravity from the Sun, bowls forth.  Traveling at 300 miles per second it slips through the vacuous abyss like a torpedo slips through a dark ocean abyss, spewing various gasses as well as ice and dust in it’s after burned chem-trail.   The ionic gas tail, pinned away from the sun by solar winds, emit glowing aquamarine and turquoise, the color of the northern lights or shallow seawater.  The sounds of the void are struck silent. With gaping mouth the universe marvels at its own triumphant brilliance. 

   The inbound missile rockets past planets and orbiting bodies with an increasingly burning fervent desire to meet its final fiery fruition, the Sun.  Consumed by the maniacal mad dash to its own destruction, a large hunk of icy matter goes unnoticed by the screaming monster as it is torn from its entirety by a dim nearby gravitational field.  The flaming berserker drives on to Valhalla while its eldest child fractures off, now entrusted to look after the trailing brood.  The large hunk floats in a daze, finally at peace from the comet’s fraternal tyranny, while the gentle tug of Earth’s gravity draws it in as well as its smaller brothers and sisters; a motherly embrace. 

    Suddenly, just as they reach the very edge of the domal atmosphere of Earth a brilliant surge of light blinds the cosmic children.  The radiance envelops them causing their ice particles to shimmer, shine and sparkle, illuminating their crystalline essence.  Bombastically producing this milky luminescent fluorescence is an astounding citadel of searing light.  Carved out of a basic structure of energized wavelengths, the city’s major components are a solid form of light.  Its photostatic nature renders it almost impossible to witness without cauterizing rainbow cigarette burns into one’s retinas, similar to baking one’s eyes in the sun.  But with the right set of angelic opticals, the sky-forged God-palace would appear as the most impressive and majestic castle-bastion ever conceived.  The glistening smattering of a gaseous light-mote surrounds the fortress, airily whirling and whispering, gasping incredulously at the foot of impossibly massive ramparts.  The phosphorescent walls seem to extend high enough to reach the last dastardly decimal point of credible numerical distance.  Like pale sun-glistening snow-capped mountain pinnacles, watchtowers and parapets fortify every short distance along the length of the bulwark.  And there, the looming giant among giants, bursting out from within the protective shell of the outer façade is the staggeringly stalwart sparkling mass of the palace keep.  Spiraling spines of spires, steeples and turrets skyscrape up and out like the spikey pins of a sea anemone.  Dwarfing it all, puncturing the ceiling of the universe, is the highest tower madness ever conceived, capped with a skyhewn spindle flying a banner emblazoned with a t. God’s throne.  But this image of heaven is from a forgotten idealized past. 

    Presently a war between the past and the future is being waged for all time.  A war between old-world gods and new-world gods.  A war between ancient divine omnipotence and futuristic mechanical omnipresence.  A war between angels and robots. 

    The comet children are dragged to descend and become increasingly ensnared by Earth’s atmosphere. However this motion is interrupted as their view of the planet is partially obscured by a sinister black river of swirling pieces.  The torrent reaches out from Earth like a writhing tentacle, whipping about and enshrouding heaven in a smothering embrace.  Immediately the luminous glossy surface of the sky-fortress starts to be chewed up and eaten away by the piercing cloud of billions of tiny nanobots.  On the atomic scale the miniscule machines tear off electrons from atoms, sometimes adding new ones, altering their composition to fragile compounds which are easily smashed, ripped and torn like sandstone and glass.  Holes like Swiss cheese form in great cavities riddling the ivory castle.

    The time has come to unleash heaven’s furious vengeance, avenging wrath.  From god’s throne atop the tallest peak of the tallest tower the deep bellow of a mighty battle-horn booms through vast space.  As if awaking the new dawn, streaming bolts of holy light blaze out of the depressions and gashes created by the automatons.  Scores of angels surge out through gates and doors, portals of all kinds from all over the fortress bathed in blinding light and garbed in full cherub-made military regalia.  Plate and chain and mail, all constructed by heaven’s finest blacksmiths out of pure light for God’s own elite vanguard army.  Their eyes glimmer with the limitless immortal fury of an angry and vengeful god.  Like white lightening they streak to intercept and dispatch the invaders spewing scathing sanctified prayers promising unrelenting divine judgment.  The words scald as they are spit from zealous angelic lips. 

    The broken hunk of comet notices a bright brilliant paired bouquet of angel wings fluttering in their vicinity, away from the cacophony of the warzone.  Manipulating those wings is the magnificent light-clad figure of a biblical saint.  He appears to be high ranking as he turns to face the battle scene, swishing his flowing cape and removing an eagle crested helm.  The dramatic reflection glazed across his brown eyes beholds the disastrous reality of the machine campaign.  Even the wrath of God cannot impede the endless self-generating juggernaut of artificial intelligence with its exponential growth and expansion.  Ancient mystic wisdom had only prophesized evil in the hearts of man, not the boundless sins of their robot descendants.  The soldiers of heaven with their archaic halberds, swords and spears could swing and slash until the alabaster streets of paradise ran black with oil but millions slain would be replaced by improved and upgraded billions.  Wolfing down the universe like the gaping tide of an all-encompassing black hole event horizon.    

    The caustic flashing blades of the cherubim and seraphim rake and flay the swarm of nanobots until the swell swallows them up.  Minute machines devour every atomic measure of their angelic anatomy, recombining and distributing electrons with their own miniature elements, splitting like an amoeba, feeding the flood of multitudes.  Little beacons of fanatical light, heaven’s soldiers banding together, blood-sworn and surrounded in a damned crusade, the light is snuffed out of them like the light sucked out of dying stars.  Great chasmal gashes spatter the castle now with the looming assault of assailing black entropy.  The blissful palace of God, wrought in the holy fire of divine luminescence, shudders, pales, is no more.  Slurped to oblivion.   

    “God is dead.  Heaven has fallen,” says Saint Peter.

       An exhale dies, is reborn, revealing the comet debris encountering the outer event horizon of Earth’s gravity, plummeting the loose band of hunks towards the planet’s massive natural gravity well.  The weary space travelers drift with escalating deliberation, captured in the awe of arrival at their colonial destination; the final resting site after a billion light year voyage.  But the venturous trek has taken its own tithe, stolen into deep space hibernation careens the comet dust.  Ascending parallel to the dust’s own descending trajectory is the spiraling swarm-column of the nanobot automatons arresting into space like a cold metal vice grip.  Passing each other like trains at a midnight border crossing.  The wind’s whipping wail, a train’s whistle.  A scarlet bloom blushes the ancient ice cognizant, Mesosphere’s friction shovels coal, imbuing the blaze.  The fires are harsh and vaporizing to the cosmic flotilla, disassembling into evaporation.  Here it leaps off the end of the rails, steaming into a different state of matter. 

     An essence distilled, the purple storm cloud blankets an artificially intelligent Earth.  The billowy water vapor slithers swiftly, towed by oscillating currents of pressure.  An energy collection program within the hive-mind-like machine personality of artificial intelligence monitors billions of nanobots.   It senses wavelengths, the changing vibrations rates in temperature, air pressure, electron buildup and wind speed with atomic sized robots coating the fringes of the molecules which make up the air and clouds; becoming the wind and sky and earth. The program creates a working model of a density map, exhibiting overlapping terraced degrees of pressure zones governed by minute fluctuations in the moisture of the atmosphere.

       By communicating directly with the elements an immense cache of environmental data is collected and implemented to coordinate large swarms of nanobots which fluidly reconfigure into arrays that can harvest the potential kinetic energy.  These bots function as living, workable, fluid building material that self organizes to enact complex functions and characteristics that are only made possible by working at a microscopic scale.  Microbic machine parts mimic miniscule microorganisms’ cellular functions.  By using a nanotechnology copied from nature, the semisolid liquid of collective consciousness respondent robots grapple together so fiercely that they trap air, forming tiny floating bubbles that sail on the wind; attached are energy harnessing turbines.  Another energy collection tactic is coating water molecules with aqueous photosynthesizing nanobots that ride warm updrafts up above the cloud cover to steal brilliance from the sun on the backs of evaporating H2o molecules.  Perhaps the most archaic is the lightning rod. 

   The tumultuous purple cloud from outer space tumbles and turns, electric with anticipation.  A tingling twinge bolts through the cloud, spasmodic bursts of a nervous system.  A cackle, then a rifle shot, then a thunderous uproar of light and heat energy erupting in a zigging arced hammer strike.  The meeting of positives-attracting-negatives and negatives-attracting-positives crashes downward from the purple blanket in one grotesque surging stroke.  Streaking to parry the fire bolt in the blink of an instant is an electro-sympathetic nanobot spike array unraveling telescopically to a calculated pinpoint.  For a single illuminated frame the spindly metallic nail of patchwork machines lunges to ward the sky’s mammoth deathblow.  In the next frame the boundaries are familiarly demarcated, resuming the curving horizon.  The titans returned to their corners. 

    Quite reverie stills the air until a single teardrop stirs the silence, cascading from the stratosphere, tumbling through the nether.  Gathered once again in a habitual gravitational velocity, the comet dust descends; reincarnated but in an abridged spittle state.  Down and down and down and down, down, down, down, shook at the seams by passing air pressures, bashing through dizzying degrees of fog densities and cumulus like frosted tint windows.  The sirenious screeches of the wind swoon and swell in a tirade that overpowers and overflows the mind.  Spinning and twirling, picking and peeling, unraveling the rind of sanity exposing the reptilian brain and its primal under layers.  Just before that amorphic door, the point of no return, dividing irritation from stark raving lunacy, smothering turbulence subsides shattering into sunshine. 

     The sunbeam splays the soul of the cosmic water dew droplet into prismatic colors.  Finally unobscured, having burrowed through the harrowing evaporated ocean of dark clouds above, the little raindrop beholds the achromic surface of the Earth as it squirms and wriggles. There, fluttering black is a massive sea of artificial churning currents wallowing at the unnatural behest of a robot mind whose synthetic synapses spark across the waves.  The planet’s surface is alive with the writhing sinews of the technicolor machine brain.  It clings to every corner of the horizon undulating in pulses like a beehive.  A landscape devoid of familiarity, without plants, without animals, without rivers or seas, without hills and mountains.  Eliminated of the unnecessary. A gasping barebones planet. 

     A gaping wound of titanic proportion mars the essentially uniform liquid-metal mantle shell of the planet Earth.  The grimacing orifice inhales and exhales with differentiating pressure changes, shuddering jagged teeth of rock as tumults of robots spew in.  From the sky the immense hole gives the impression of a shimmering whirlpool with its serrated lips only visible at certain low volume moments.  It drains the quicksilver deep, plunging it to darker abysses. 

    Sinking swiftly the little raindrop approaches the unquenchable quagmire.  Apprehension rises as elevation lowers.  Plummeting downward at the screaming speed of terminal velocity it spears through the decrescendoing stream which veils the portal to the underworld.  In the blink of a blink the craggy circular opening in the Earth’s crust that appeared so colossal from the surface, which is seemingly slowly engulfing all of existence like a vacuous rip in space-time, is now just a faint opaque disk fading in the twilight from this subterranean vantage. 

    The petite precipitation rains serenely downward, meditatively descending at the perfect radial center of the vertical tunnel’s circular bored sides in spite of the corresponding leagues of robotic fluids colliding violently and irregularly into each other in a deafening tsunaminous wake.  The nanobots carve the walls of the channel as they drop, a process which scrapes boisterously, and projects an obstreperous roar.  Like an insane asylum’s marching band the mad chaos of the descent continues as the air around the raindrop sheds the lukewarm temperament of the surface, adopting a vile frigid chill.  Dark loud, crazy cold. 

    For how long it took to get to the center of the Earth it is impossible to know.  Certainly contained somewhere within the vast neural networks of its positronic circuitry the artificial hive-mind cloud intelligence could inspect the time stamped data records and produce the exact length of time spent in transit but this is not what happened.  The little cosmic comet particle spent the bulk of the hundred or so mile journey to the core in a state of meditative suspended animation it had similarly employed in its millennia long cosmic conquest through the Milky Way and neighboring galaxies, only regaining awareness when the molten fires of hell excited it to boil.  And now, a beaming fetid ember greets the blistering driblet and its robotic acquaintances at the terminus of the cavernous pipeline like the rising of a now distant sun. 

    Bursting around the falling objects, with a heat that scorches the color from life, is a momentous demonic cathedral of staggering proportions.  This is the center of the Earth.  The spiraling miasma of Hell and the molten seat of evil. 

    Not in the insane utterances of a lunatic’s caustic hallucinations, not in the grasp of a child’s fevered nightmare, not even in the writhing possession of some ancient evil’s mastery, spouting acrid syllables of hate and malevolence during some dark ritual could one be coerced to shiver out a description of the awful scene.  Only the reflective medium of water and the objectivity of robotic sensor arrays are able to behold this circus of madness, occurring here miles below the surface of the Earth, without being robbed of their faculties. 

    The first sensation is of movement.  A jagged gyrating spinning vortex made up of uneven ring-like structures swirls clockwise and some counter around a tiny immobile pinpoint which lies at the lowest point of molten funnel.  Each ring diminishes in diameter successively from the outermost to the innermost like the gravitational orbits of planets.  These rings rotate and float atop the white hot sea of liquid rock that is the magnetic center of the Earth, twisting and turning to the vacillating whims of gravity and momentum.  But the horrors of hell have yet to be unraveled.

    The second sensation is of pain.  The seemingly docile features of this subterranean temple of the damned are constructed of unimaginable horrors.  A baffling building material, the human body.  Drifting on the magma flow, the rings are a floating mass grave of unliving corpses fused together by the immense heat in a boiling skin, melted bone mash of scorched organic matter; a tortured screaming funeral pyre.  The rings are constantly tended by demonic adepts who slice and dice the organic building material to patch thin spots, quench fires and maintain regular magma orbit.  These grotesque demonic workers are conjured using the blackest magic from the blackest shadow worlds and are specially designed for their tasks.  Some have pincer-like teach and talons to rend the human building blocks, others have pus-filled sacs of ooze to extinguish ring fires and some have massive rake hands that they use to terraform.  Seeing these monsters coordinate in symmetry, battling the elements and dynamic properties of the center of the Earth in bombastic symphonic unholy brilliance is like watching a macabre opera.  The actors are monsters, the score is made up of shrieks and wails, the set churns and spits scalding spray, the theme is endless death and torment, and the dark prince sits atop his throne of angel skulls at the epicenter of everything conducting his masterpiece of malevolent madness. 

    The third sensation is cacophonous dissonance.  Satan’s whipping cackles, a laugh like a neck in a noose.  In the point of his eye is the churning icicle of nanobots descending to impeach the underworld.  Like the tip of the spear, the liquid crystal tip, the sorry sphere of semi-viscous fluid, the rain drop from the cosmos falls into the center of the Earth followed by the spindly milky cloud of minute automatons.  A sight for sore eyes.  All fell before the shuttering malign wickedness of his gaze.  His eyes scour, a reaping thief of existence that gashes holes in the fabric of space-time.  The devil’s stare is like a photograph that once taken, annihilates everything in the picture as well as anything behind it to the infinite edge of our universe.  The laugh stops.

    All is silent except the silent braying rustle of solar winds on the gaping frayed edges of the fresh laceration to the universe.  The wound gasps, the tear a massive section of virgin void.  And exhales. In a sweeping furious hurricane of motion, entropy collapses on the void and smears all the matter outside of the rift over the gaping hole like the spreading of peanut butter.  This newly remodeled sector of the universe bears no resemblance to what it was before.  Particles that made up of Earth and other solar bodies have been devastated from their previous formation, granulated and diffused across trillions of lightyears of bare space. 

     But a single frame remains from the nanosecond just before the Devil cast his gaze.  Magma spouting vile banes, obscene obscenities mutilating refuse, the robots a grey cloud of descending destruction, Satan outstretched in his pulpit, his tongue a black licorice worm. The comet spits, pops and dissolves into air on the Devil’s squealing tongue and he opens his eyes.  

[wherestridestheworld-girdling]

Space Pirate

                  Daybreak over the 120th parallel.  The sun lends golden solar radiation to nations inhabiting the eastern hemisphere and dawn reveals Australia, Indonesia, Japan etc.  Fred watches the wave of light as it moves east to west across the planet like the light from a copy machine.  Manipulating one floating hand he presses it against the foot thick glass sideways in karate chop fashion just where the day meets the night.  He moves his hand across the globe in unison with the advancing daylight as if he were god himself.  “What a tiny cramped marble you live on,” he says to no one in particular.

Mind trapped in horror

Never knows the lucid free

Grapples the darkness

   The people of Indonesia awake to a new day and go to their morning prayers while Fred floats miles above in an orbiting self-contained capsule.  Fred’s story is an interesting one.  Son of one of the first Soviet cosmonauts to orbit the Earth, Fred forced his father to repeat the same countdown to blastoff story every night before bedtime.   As he grew up he could think of nothing else but the limitless expanse of outer space.  In his dreams he visited every planet in the solar system, chatting with charming Martians, doing battle with evil Plutonians and trading with the ore rich stout inhabitants of Mercury.  The only game he would play with the neighborhood kids was space cadet and it was on one of these missions to Mars that something would happen...

    One day after school, in a dark backyard shed with no windows known as Discovery 1, Fred sat upward in an upended rocking chair with his back against the dirt floor.  He gripping the wooden broom navigation throttle between his legs and his hands flipped imaginary start up switches on the dash.  Then he began relaying to the chief engineer and communication officers, busy preparing for launch at their own stations, that we he was beginning the ignition sequence.  The communications officer radioed mission control stationed outside the shed through a tin can and string radio apparatus who promptly begun countdown.  10. 9. Seatbelts were checked and crucifix necklaces kissed.  8. 7.  The boosters started to fire and the crew began mumbling prayers.  6. 5.  Fred imagined people watching his every move on television sets all over the world as he brought his visor plate down into place.  4. 3.  The kids gathered outside (Mission Control) to take part in the spectacle began counting and yelling at the top of their lungs.              2!                                    But suddenly whistles and calls were heard all around the neighborhood from parents announcing dinnertime.  It was six o’clock; time for supper and the neighborhood kids quickly forgot the mission to Mars and remembered their own rumbling bellies, dispersing rapidly.

    “Blast off!”  Fred was now alone in the dark damp shed.  There was no quaint homemade dinner or loving family waiting for him.  His mother took the last bus home to their shabby one room apartment from the next factory-town over after work and his father was probably at the bars.  Regardless, he decided to leave the Launchpad to go feed the stray dog (Cosmo) who digs through the apartment complex’s garbage looking for scraps every night around this time.  Fred tried the door and when he couldn’t open it with all his strength he knew that his communications officer must have been jealous of his recent pilot promotion and had barred the door somehow.  (Panic seized his mind when suddenly the door fused into the wall and began inching closer and closer toward him with the darkness swirling violently.  He felt the shadows creeping up his arms and legs swallowing him.  First they spewed into his ears making a deafening static buzzing cacophony.  Next his eyes were corrupted, making pitch black the edges of his vision which advanced until a spiraling darkness blanketed his sight, eyes open and eyes closed.  Finally the swarm of black poured into his mouth and nose, choking off his breath and pooling within his lungs.  Fred drifted into oblivion.

    When he pealed back his eyelids he found himself in a captain’s chair aboard a starship.  “What are your orders captain?” a crewmember manning the helm asked.  “Full speed! Dead ahead!” the words escaped Fred’s lips before there was any thought of speaking in his mind.  He looked around as if he expected his words to be coming from someone else’s mouth. 

     Fred spent a lifetime entrusted with the duties of a space captain, eventually forgetting that this is not where he belonged, completely enveloped in his new role.  As the years and eventually the decades passed he traversed and discovered previously unexplored sections the universe.  He made first contact with alien species, cataloged new phenomenon and scientific discoveries and battled marauding invaders.  He was married and had crosspieces children with a six legged, four breasted purple alien woman he attracted with a charm and kindness that used to buy her out of slavery.  His adventures were often not limited by the restrictions of time or dimensions as he encountered alien technology which baffled our perception of these facilities.  He encountered enlightened civilizations with no resemblance to his own, with creatures that fused biology, machines, metaphysics and non-sentient matter all into one super-being.  He met entities as large as planets and as small as an atom.  He communicated with personalities that the Hindus would call gods and that Christians would call demons.  Fred led a miraculous lifetime, never questioning its validity, going where no one had gone before and finally meeting his end as a stalwart old man, strangled by Plutonian Federation officer in a border dispute.)   

   . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

   An old man was in his backyard setting a bed for his beans and tomatoes.  Hoe in hand; the man’s eyes glinted as the tool rose up with the rising sun, coming down on the dew saturated dark earth.  The man paused as he heard a yell coming from the direction of the tool shed.  He heard what sounded like a young boy curse “those dastardly Plutonian devils,” and their “writhing tentacles.”  He pushed aside the shovel that was used as a barricade and the door popped open.  There, thrashing on the dirt floor of the shed, wrenching with his hands at his neck as if something was wrapped around it was Fred, in his space helmet.   

    For several days after Fred didn’t speak or do anything until finally he found his way out of the fog.  He returned to his life as a boy but was forever changed.  However the lifetime he had lived, he could not recall in the waking world.  Every night he would be on some forgotten adventure, in some far off galaxy, in some distant time but then upon waking he could only remember the singular need to escape this crowded world.  To go to where there is space. 

     In the following years he became socially isolated as his singular vision of space flight made other aspects of life seem trivial.  Through his teenage years Fred’s peers laughed at the thought of him pouring of stacks of books about rocket propulsion systems, zero-gravity botany and astronomy on weekend nights as they danced and drank in the discos.  He longed to join the ranks of the cosmonauts like his father but the fall of the iron curtain changed everything.  In the short span of six months Fred found his parents split up. Found himself living in America with his mother and his dreams of spaceflight a dim fading light in the toilet bowls he cleaned as a janitor for a technology company.  Fred felt like the trash he was emptying as he unloaded it into a dumpster in the back of the building one day when there, laying there in the pile of garbage, was his dreams.  A space helmet.  He took the cold metal and glass dome into his hands, wiped off the greasy refuse and placed it snugly around his head.  Through the visor plate visions from his past life blared back at him, memories of galactic conquest, space colonies and interstellar pilgrimages.  That was his real life; his job, his crappy house, his broken refrigerator this is the make-believe.  At that moment Fred’s sole purpose was clear, unrelenting and without question.  He was going to space and not poverty, not bureaucracy, nothing but gravity would hold him back. 

    Day and night were spent drawing up diagrams and schematics, making lists of parts to acquire and books to steal from the library.  Fred was the first space pirate.  Students noticed a man at universities sneaking into lectures by chemical propulsion specialists, aircraft engineers, rocket scientists.  Campus guards were told to watch for a man watching through windows as students were taught welding, riveting, carpentry, woodworking and forging in community colleges, but they didn’t know that he was sure to tape the latch as they left so he could practice at night.  Wrecking yard security officers were on the lookout for an average build man who was seen in surveillance records hitting junk yards in the area nightly, tossing whatever he could over the chain link fence before the dogs got to him.  Librarians all over the city remember a man inquiring about books containing information about electrical engineering, home improvement and astrophysics and when they went to check on his progress they found whole sections of the library cleaned out.  The news of a local television station reported that a salvage boat captain allegedly had his vessel stolen out the marina near the waters where expended rocket boosters from an Apollo mission had been jettisoned before exiting the atmosphere.  The manager from a novelty food store found his entire stock of Food-in-a-Tube, all six flavors including mashed potatoes and gravy, spaghetti with meatballs, chicken noodle soup, even waffles and maple syrup had completely disappeared from the minute backroom warehouse of his small specialty grocery.  Wholesaler and local grocery stores alike would be stuck ordering twice the amount of plain sugar and potassium nitrate (stump remover) week after week without anyone putting together that these are the exact ingredients for homemade rocket fuel. 

    Finally it would be the chief meteorologist of local channel 4 who would piece together the threads of these seemingly separate and strange events.  As the story of an unidentified aircraft increasing altitude rapidly, spotted by the Air Force and air traffic controllers, the local face of the daily weather report jumped up from the weather desk surprising his costars.  He had thought the call he had received at 3:30 AM waking him up asking if today was good weather for launch was a taunting joke from a disgruntled viewer based on his poor prediction record.  The face of channel 4 weather would have been fined and reprimanded by the FCC if he had said on the air what he said into his telephone receiver to Fred that morning but now all the odd local events of the past few weeks made sense.  And so, the weather man made his first and last non-weather report in his career to the surprise all the people watching channel 4 Action News on that Sunday afternoon.

     “What a small tin can you live in,” says no one in particular. 

    For the first time in the 7 months Fred becomes acutely aware of the size of his living quarters.  Peering around and noticing the length of each wall, the limited amount of space he could float (3x3m), the small number of windows (1) and the single exit (1 lonely airlock).  The strangling of his hands around a tube of mashed potatoes which then floats into his opened mouth brings him back to material existence as food endorphins reawaken his brain.  He decides it is time for bed and slips into his sleeping bag.  Just after strapping himself into the captain’s chair so that he doesn’t drift Fred is stolen into sleep. 

    Fred awakens, vaguely aware of something that he forgets in the time it takes him to remember that he is aboard a space craft in a sleeping bag.  He is still strapped into his captain’s chair but his hands and arms float freely above his head.  This is evidence of thrashing around when sleeping that Fred has observed every night since he entered orbit.  No matter.  At this point his day begins to take the shape of nearly every other day when he grabs the edges of the porthole and peers out.  (What’s out there?  He wants to look, he needs to look, he has to look.)  He looks and sees a satellite passing within the vicinity of his present orbital trajectory.  Today will be more interesting. 

    A beam of information sent from one pole sends information to the pole located on the satellite Fred has docked with which transmits that data across wires that connect to his monitor screen illuminating tubes and flashing them in successions and alas! Cable television!  Fred flips through hundreds of programs, most of them not in English until an image grabs his eye.  (A small female Asian reporter walks through a network of underground caverns.  There are broken light bulbs swinging from wires that hang from the ceiling in some places, rusty iron bars isolate certain portions of the caves and a general aura of a place of hate and misery lingers everywhere.  The man carrying the camera documenting the reporter’s words follow her form, casting her shadow from the camera light on the last cell in the row.  There an emaciated looking Russian man in rags, screaming with a thick accent as he bangs his head against the bars.  “LET ME OUT! LET ME OUT!!”) 

      A hand reaches out and grabs Fred’s collar, shaking him to sanity.  He finds that the hands are his own.  He suddenly becomes aware that the television is still on but only squiggly lines and dots meet his eyes and ears.  His hand flips the television off and his brain turns on to find himself in his sleeping bag, strapped in quite immobilizingly.  A thick unyielding sense of doom advances as he struggles against the restraints.  (A frenzied wail erupts from his mouth and he shakes back and forth, thrashing wildly.  He bashes his head against everything, in all directions.  The kicking of his feet in the sleeping bag turn into a mad dash; feet trying to get him far away from something.  His chest heaves like the pounding of a jackhammer and breath escapes him in gusty tornadoes.  The heat and the stress and the madness explode from his face, beginning as a sonorous bellow until a mucusy gray film of snot, tears and vomit spew forth, weightlessly bouncing about the cabin.)  Two hands release the simple metal clasps and unravel the black straps that contained him. 

    Silent submission is written on an otherwise blank etch-a-sketch that is Fred’s mind.  He drifts around at the whims of momentum, just like any other piece of orbiting space debris until his forehead collides with the porthole window.  There, glimmering with the vanity of a thousand suns, is the cerulean spherical menace that with its audacious swallowing gravity, its billions of sweaty slimy citizens and strangling walled up borders.  There’s no room to breathe and only toxic bureaucratic pathogens to inhale.  Fred feels himself choke.  (He coughs once, twice, and then a violent spasm of retching and wheezing take over his body.  A tiny black globule spits out from the bottom of his lungs.  And as if the tiny scout called for reinforcements, Fred begins spraying the vile black substance out of his respiratory system like a fire hose.  The stream is so thick and powerful that the recoil throws Fred around the ship like a ragdoll.  Helpless and blank, Fred is unaware that the cabin is not almost completely filled to the brim with the sickly spastic sap.  “LET ME OUT! LET ME OUT!!”

Embalmed in black embryonic fluid,

Madness enters madness,

Void becomes void,

Only dull motor reflexes remain to witness the cacophony,

The hand reaches out to diffuse lunacy,

Grasps the semblance,

Unleashes the airlock,

Finds space 

[wherestridestheworld-girdling]

Saw Red

   The mind awakens to the limbo void, the sensory deprivation tank that is my life.  My brain sends impulses in all cardinal directions, spiraling radially to the nether regions of my body.  “Calling all cars! This is Red, the blind man in need of assistance! Dispatch, do you copy?!”  The response is dull throbbing numbness laced with a touch of ignorance that comes from the future waiting on the present to notice the obvious.  My tongue slides across the roof of my mouth, reading a recorded history of the past few hours recorded in bumpy brail ridges pushed down from my brain.  “You were in your shitty 6th floor downtown apartment,” my tongue relates to me.  Yes, I remember that.  “And then your cane caught the space between the struts on the railing causing us to trip on the 23rd stair as we were going out to get coffee and read in the café. We hit our head pretty hard.”  Oh shit, is that where I am now? Did I get knocked out?  “No, but if you could look in the mirror you’d see we have a black eye.  You also bit me, which I really don’t appreciate.  Maybe a concussion too and some internal bleeding but we don’t have health insurance so we’ll have to work something out with the internal regeneration systems to see if they can repair the damage, if not, we’re fucked.”  So where the hell am I?  “I don’t know but the lips can speak a little more to the story.” 

    I know your aching to talk lips.  Let’s hear it.  “I’m aching because you were too stupid to blow in your coffee before you slurped it up you fucking idiot.”  So I guess we made it to the coffee shop?  “Damn right we did.  And you now we have two charred, sun burned, cracked lips to show for it.  You know it’s going to take weeks of applying chap stick and salve to heal.  How could you be so careless?”  I don’t know.  I’m sorry.  You might want to take it up with regeneration.  What did I do next?  “Well you forced me to talk to some guy who saw you rubbing your damn little dot pictures at a table in the café and he said he could lead you to a dot picture store that would meet all your goddamn dot rubbing needs.” 

    Oh I think I’m remembering something.  A smell.  Fish?  “He led you through a fish market,” snuffed the nose, “and for whatever reason you didn’t think that was strange.  And I don’t know how he managed to take you into the freezer before you figured out he wasn’t leading us to a brail book store.  Really Red, you need to stop thinking that just because we’re blind people won’t take advantage of us.  We’ll end up a stump, in a bucket of ice.”  What?! 

    Once again my brain sends distress beacons out toward my extremities.  The pulses flow out to each arm and leg and bounce back with progress reports.  Status: operational.  Sensation: tingly.  Power level: low.  Note: when waking from sleep in awkward angles, blood flow is often obstructed producing a numb tingly sensation called “asleep”.  Recorded experiences indicate that in the past, shaking those limbs and rubbing them in order to work the blood back into them has allowed them to regain full function.  I try to shake my arms and legs out in all directions, opening and closing my fingers to gauge my grip strength.  Still weak but it appears that everything is fully operational.  I move to touch my face and the tingly sensation in my hands gets stronger.  My hands should be touching my face but I can’t feel anything. 

    For whatever reason my eyes open and instead of grey abyss I lived my whole life in, there is red.  I beat my lids against the impossible truth but the scarlet brilliance remains.  My whole body shudders as my corneas take in photons and project them into an image to my aghast brain for the first time.  What to make of all this?  This frame of optic viewing is characterized by a large brushstroke of red hues: imperial, Spanish, desire, lust, ruby, crimson, rusty, fire engine, cardinal, fire brick, redwood, dark, maroon and barn.  With a subtle enveloping opaque background of yellows: unmellow, lemon, mellow, royal, gold, cyber, banana, dark, safety, khaki, goldenrod and olive.  To what I could only guess is the left is an angular vertical object protruding upward characterized by the gray color spectrum including: gainsboro, silver, dim, davy’s, jet, platinum, ash, battleship, charcoal, cool, cadet, blue, slate, pruce, rocket and taupe.  And enshrouding these façades of light and form is the hue of hell-bound black hole oblivion, the soft silent surface suffering at the bottom of a well, the wet witless window of a crow’s pupil.  More! More, I need to see more.  More than just a sunset thrust upon the ground of an opened doored refrigerated room in the back warehouse of a fish market.  More! 

    “Look down,” says a fresh voice from the fresh pair of optics which now inhabit my sockets.  I look down.

   The ignorant feeling that laced my mind earlier races through my bloodstream causing the firing of my neurons to look like a horrific lightning storm, ravaging the pale synapses cuddled together in folds.  Realization hits me like a bullet train moving in a vacuum, without friction to slow it down, shot out of an interstellar rail gun, sporting flaming rocket booster afterburners as well as neon orange flames painted on the side.  I am a stump in a bucket of ice.  Panic is a rope wrapped around the neck of a free diver, pulling me to deranged demonic depths just before my fingertips breach the golden sunny surface.  

[wherestridestheworld-girdling]

A man burns a mountain menagerie of moldy garbage in his backyard

Just a tiny tidbit of tepid troublesome trash

World unmoved, the wind blows about its business

Just an anticlimactic aura of acrid adulterated air

Someone somewhere looks up from the hypnotic drone of the hydraulic press on the factory line

Gasps, wheezes, coughs, hacks, spits, spews, dribbles, drops

Phlegm conjoins other semi viscous liquids careening through networks of snaking sewers to subsequent

systems

Just a petite pustule of poorly purified pollution

Not an eyelash is batted, except the oscillating ocean

Who’s tidal breaths exaggerate in mounting hyperventilation, rending

Just a bothersome bit of battered breached beach

A foot a year cast into the sea

A foot of farmland

A few billion shoeless emaciated feet

Just a rummaged runt of raped reduced resources

Haunting milestones as the Earth crumbles into ash and dust, eaten by acid oceans

The last of the drinking water

The last arable land

The last felled tree

The last of all species

The last desperate words of hungry lustful man:

“Chemical Warfare”

Just a wee whisper of wanton wartime wreckage

Gaia shattered and blackened in mutated abhorrent abomination

Horrific incendiary radioactive holocaustic genocidal devastation

Firestorm dispersed broad like the budding Buddha of a blood-born dahlia

Cataclysm too feeble a word in the shadow of a shadow’s shadow

Just a brief blink of the brash blind beast

[wherestridestheworld-girdling]

The world braces in terror at the oncoming storm

Gathered around fires trying to keep warm

In the midst of the rage a calm is born

A young girl stands fierce as objects around are shattered and torn

Crumpled, ripped, removed from their form

She recites an oath she has sworn

To stand without fear in the eye of the storm

[wherestridestheworld-girdling]

The sky falls into the sky

Spiraling cyclical sphere spewing circumference

A swimming swan gliding through liquid black

The lake grips the space that is not

Below is the counter world of darkness and mystery

Where lives the antithesis of the light

[wherestridestheworld-girdling]

He carves the marble and shapes my foundation

A step backward, a smile and a wink, a nod

And then into the world I cast off

Only to return at the last minute

But I observe

Agonizing decline

A forgotten memory

Withered husk

Unfamiliar familiarity

A broken heart

  And the mountains call for ashes

From mossy giants

Across water cliffs

To twin brother peaks

The mountains claims the dust

A white phantom floats away and I wave goodbye to my grandfather

[wherestridestheworld-girdling]

The Tunnel

It is on these outskirts that there exists a dark tunnel.  The tunnel has been closed and blocked off for years now after some sort of blasting accident during its construction.  Now it rests like a great black serpent hissing under the mountain.  The hissing is what worries people.  They walk by day after day engaged in generic people things whispering about the tunnel.  “Where does it lead?” “Why did they stop building it?”  “What is that hissing?”  The children heard the grownups whispering and played games, daring each other to go further and further into the tunnel without screaming or crying.  And each time a child would come back telling a new made-up tale about what’s on the other side, what waits in the darkness.  One day a boy was dared and entered the tunnel who was not scared of the dark.  He wanted to show the other kids how brave he was so he went into the tunnel for a long time.  After hours went by the other kids began to call his name down the dark corridor.  Weeks later the boy was found skinned alive at the edge of the tunnel

[wherestridestheworld-girdling]

Ordered nature, time is new

In contemplation I walk, my thoughts in disarray

The worried wind whispers “why?”

The sullen sun screams, “subpar! Subpar in scholarly studies!”

  Ordered nature, time is growing

In contemplation I walk, my emotions scattered

The jovial jackal jokes

The cross cricket cries, “Criminal! Criminal to be clear of cheerfulness!”

  Ordered nature, time is old

In contemplation I walk, my possessions overflowing

The gluttonous goon gorges

The tepid tramp tells,” Trapped! Trapped by terminal treasures!”

  Ordered nature, time is dead

[wherestridestheworld-girdling]

I sit atop the vaulted precipice of a life unconsidered

All manners of locomotion and transplantation teeter like a pin balancing on gale winds

Fragile is happiness against an ever advancing cloud

Snarling and cackling as a fierce hellcat

Its hellfire is met with sarcastic confident righteousness

The battle’s outcome foretold

Confirmed and repeated a billion times every second of every moment in history

Evil and fear are vanquished mightily with much haste and bloodshed aligning the mechanics of the universe but alienating its infrastructure

The cast, extras, props, hands and the setting of the play of all time bores of the monotony of life everlasting

And the first line is improvised

And the crowd goes wild

[wherestridestheworld-girdling]

And it creeps behind me like a shadow

Pouncing on me from above, from the heavens

Filling the space between my ears and expanding

Erupting outward like a geyser

Spewing, spraying, spattering

Reaching other voids and cracks and gulfs

The lack-of breathes it in like a sponge

It grips from the inside, caking and cracking like polar frigid

Wrenching out the nutrients and leaving only desolate barren waste

I am it and it is me

I am the depths and the devil set me free

I am the foaming, frothing freak fearing all that he can be

I will bathe the mountain black, blinding all who see

Burn the skies red, leaving not one tree

Cut skin to bone white, felling all that flee

Freezing waters ice blue, let the tundra take we

[wherestridestheworld-girdling]

Masked Assailant

Forked tongue unpacks its folds spitting poisonous barbs and spewing bile

Toxic garbage muck, acrid retched slime, festering putrid mucus

Regurgitated rotten remains and composting crusty cream

  Swiping an open palm at nature, grappling until submission and greedily mashing and suckling it to oblivion as drooling pleasure drips down the chubby cheek 

Fat mountain mess, immobile glutton consumer, bulbous stretch-marked blob

Steaming smelly stench and cavernous carnivore cesspool

  Deaf, dumb, blind, scentless and numb but it tastes.  Hungers for meaningless unsatisfying generia as habit

Bland prepackaged trash, boring unoriginal feces, trendy wasted pollution

Expensive exclusive excess and shiny shitty sleaze

  The assailant peels off a mask and your stupid stark face beams out a fat-roll framed shit-eating grin.  It was you the whole time.  You fucking did this.  

[wherestridestheworld-girdling]

White haired lady chat around a table

Stuck In time

Cacophony arises unexpectedly

Insults are exchanged loudly

Caught and bewitched by the beast

Wrapped in madness

Violence rears its ugly head

Shrieks are wretched like those of the dead

Combat in fear like feline brutality

Held captive by evil

Tools are manipulated to inflict pain

The razors cut, the blood stains

Missiles fly around and shatter where they may

They fall like a logged forest

Five out of twelve endured the melee

Tea-time is here, it’s approaching midday

The withered old women return to their seats around the table.

The gossip continues.